


Masked Rider: Exo

by CaptainSarcasmAwaaay



Series: Masked Rider: Neo Generation [1]
Category: Kamen Rider Kuuga, Kamen Rider Series, Masked Rider
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Rewrite, Gen, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 18:09:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 29,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2782646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainSarcasmAwaaay/pseuds/CaptainSarcasmAwaaay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A re-imagining of Kamen Rider: Kuuga, as though it had been brought to America. Archaeology student Steven Tooms is the last survivor of what looks to be a ritual massacre, but the victims are soon spotted, killing people in broad daylight with their bare hands. Tooms finds himself the only one who can stop them when he is granted enormous powers by an ancient beetle spirit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prolouge, Part 1

"Alright, Steve, this is it. This is the tipping point."

Flashlights played over the stone walls, shining on the jagged runes of an ancient language, dead and unmourned. The tunnel stretched on into endless blackness, voices bouncing off the walls, turning speech into an unintelligible morass of noise.

"Tonight could make our careers. After this, we can name our own path, baby, we can coast on wings of gold."

Footsteps carry on the stone, dust motes dance in the sparse light. A bend in the tunnel leads to a new path, leading down into the earth. The noise gets louder, the walls practically rumbling with sound, and the air is thick with anticipation. A light is visible at the end of the path, coming ever closer.

"But this all depends on you, Steve. This is your moment, your time to shine. You're the star, these other losers are nothing without you. Your words will bring this place to life, my friend!"

The tunnel slopes down, the light growing brighter, banishing the darkness from the cave. The sounds become clearer, the voices joined by the clanking of metal tools on cold stone. The runes on the wall seem to stretch towards this chamber, their lines stretching along the wall like grasping claws.

"Are you ready for this?"

"I'm ready, man."

The tunnel opened up into an eight-sided chamber, the ancient stone walls hewn out with exacting precision and covered in jagged, angular pictograms of animals and rough, twisted, human forms. Electric lights hung from the arched ceiling, extension cords dangling down to portable generators, the lighting so bright as to bleach all the color out of the stone. At the far end of the room was a massive sarcophagus, and archaeologists and diggers were clustering around it like the worshippers of some long-forgotten god.

"You say it, but you don't feel it! I want you breathing it, feeling it, tasting it, I want it to subsume your very being. Now tell me again, are you READY for this?"

"I am so freaking ready, Hector!"

The tomb was carved from a single block of gray stone, set on an inclined podium that raised it above a man's head, giving it total dominance of the room. It was smooth, but angular, narrow at the bottom but widening out to a massive headspiece, and every square inch was covered in the same unintelligible runes that spread throughout the cave. At the far end, just at the tomb's head, was a simple carving, perhaps something to identify the man buried here. Two eyes, wide and heavy-browed, set in a determined glare, a long, thin nose, and a mouth that bore pointed fangs. It could have been the face of an insect. It could have been human.

"Then get out there and shine, Steve!"

"Yeah, let's do this!"

Steve Tooms ran in front of the camera. He was a young man, still in college, as evidenced by his Evergreen State University t-shirt. He had blue eyes, an easy smile, and dirty blonde hair that kept falling down into his eyes. His skin was slick with sweat and he was full of nervous energy, his eyes darting back and forth from the activity around him to the camera held by his friend, Hector Mendez.

"This is Steve Tooms, friendly neighborhood intern here, and this is day 16 of the Shikla excavation," he said, gesturing to the activity all around him, the diggers crawling over the sarcophagus, sketching the runes and attaching ropes to the lid. "With me, as always, is my faithful cameraman, Hector Mendez. Say hi to the folks at home, Hector!"

The camera turned around, suddenly staring Hector right in his dark brown eyes.

"Hey, this is your show, man," hector said. "Wouldn't want to hog your attention."

Hector paused for just long enough to let the image sink in, then grinned a brilliant wide grin right down the barrel of the camera and flashed a thumbs up.

"Alright man, give the ladies time to compose themselves!" said Steve, grabbing the camera and turning it back onto himself. "Now, this is a very big day for us. We discovered two dozen sarcophagi all throughout the structure, but the big prize is in this central chamber. Get a shot of that, Hector."

Steve stepped aside, letting Hector zoom in on the great sarcophagus, panning over the runes and the symbol at the head, the hands tracing almost reverently over the runes.

"Naturally, we focused all our efforts on that. Earlier today, the diggers finally managed to dissolve the seal, and we're just now getting ready to raise the lid." Steve came back into frame and pointed out the four workers tying the harness around the stone. "This is a pretty big deal, they've got all the shift leaders working on it. If you haven't been paying attention to the other videos, the guy with the tattoos is the first shift leader, Joey… Sapporo?"

"Soeprapto, dude," said Hector.

"Right, what he said," said Steve.

"It's Indonesian, dude," said Hector. "Two weeks you've been working here and you don't know anyone's name."

"I'm bad with names!" said Steve. "…actually, maybe you should do the introductions."

"Clearly we chose the wrong host," said Hector, panning from the tattooed man to the red-haired woman working beside him. "That there is Kirsten Jones, second shift leader. Madly in love with me, of course, but she denies it loudly to anyone who asks."

"Dude, our professor is going to see this," said Steve.

"Little commentary never hurt anyone," said Hector, panning to a 6'6" African-American man, bald and bulging with muscle. "That's Dwayne Lark, third shift leader. Absolute teddy bear, but I once saw him break one of the mess tables in half trying to swat a fly."

"That's on tape three," said Steve. "We should do a blooper reel."

"Finally," said Hector, panning over to a dark-haired man in a rolled-up turtleneck. He sighed. "…we have Frank Nelson."

"And the less said about Dr. Beall's favorite brown-noser the better," said Steve. "In fact, let's see if we can't edit him out entirely in post."

"Dr. Beall himself should be over here…" Hector panned around widely, finally stopping at a thin, distinguished man, with a thin grey beard and grey hair swept back from his temples. He was standing at a bank of electronic equipment where a younger, Asian woman in a black shirt was adjusting a pair of monitors. "There he is. Dr. Albert Beall, the head archaeologist on this dig."

"And that's Dr. Keiko Odagiri," said Steve. "She handles all the actual science stuff that isn't anything to do with our majors."

"Oh, you remember _her_ name," said Hector.

"Shush, you," said Steve. "Let's see if we can get an interview. Dr. Beall! Dr. O!"

Steve shouted and waved at the two doctors. They looked up, briefly, said nothing, and then went back to what they were doing.

"…and they have no time for the interns," said Steve. "…anyone else we can talk to?"

"I'm over here," somebody said. Hector and Steve whirled around to the other side of the cave, where an older, Native American man was leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets. "Not much for me to do at this stage, but no reason for me to leave."

"Dr. Peters, perfect!" said Steve, rushing over to the man. "Everyone, this is Dr. Vincent Peters, he's the expert on local history and culture. Doc, what are we looking at here?"

Dr. Peters placed a hand on his temple, squinted, and stared off into the middle distance for a while. Steve glanced at Hector, and the camera appeared to shrug.

"In my opinion… I don't have the slightest idea," said Dr. Peters. "This is Chinook land, but the architecture is completely unlike anything associated with the Chinook people. The runes on the walls are unlike anything I've ever encountered, and at the time this tomb would have been carved the people of this area would have had no system of writing. The carvings include depictions of animals such as rhinoceroses and giant squid that no Chinook had ever seen. If it were not for the age of the cave, I would call it the most poorly-researched hoax to ever waste my valuable time, but it is right here before our very eyes."

"…okay, this is getting kind of freaky," said Hector.

"Yeah…" said Steve. "Is there anything you know for sure?"

"…the name of this dig, the _Shikla_ ," said Dr. Peters. "The Chinook tell stories of the _Shikla_ as a kind of… transformative hero. Other peoples in this area have other stories of similar figures. The stories say he brought shape to this world, created the natural order that all things must follow. He molded the very land like clay, taught the trees to reach up to the sun and down for the water beneath the earth, and he gave all the animals their proper shapes. We followed the stories who told us of the resting place of the _Shikla_ , and they led us to this place."

"So… this is…" Steve could hardly get the words out, wiping the sweat from his brow. "You're saying that this is the resting place of… of _God_?"

"Hardly anything like that," Dr. Peters laughed. "The stories are told from generation to generation, much is kept, but some is lost. It's likely that the historical _Shikla_ was some great warrior or chieftain whose myth grew greater than the reality, much as it did for Gilgamesh or King Arthur."

"Everyone, be ready!" said Dr. Beall, his voice bringing a halt to activity. "We're going to attempt to raise the lid. This will be essential personnel only. Whatever is in there has been undisturbed for seven thousand years, we can't risk contamination."

"Well, that's us out," said Hector. "Come on, let's watch from the hall."

"Killing the lights!" said Dr. Odagiri, plunging the room into darkness, with only the glow of the monitors and a few dull, red, darkroom lights to see by.

"…or not," said Hector, filing out of the room with Steve and Dr. Peters. "…does this thing have night vision?"

"Let's do it like this," said Steve. "The red light is really cool."

"It's a great shot," said Dr. Peters. "Zoom in. I want to see this up close."

Soeprapto, Jones, Lark and Nelson took their ropes and pulled, and the lid of the sarcophagus rose, opening like the mouth of some giant, predatory bird. Hector zoomed in as close as he could get, as the blood-red lights illuminated the still, desiccated corpse hiding inside its prison of stone, unseen for countless ages. His camera captured a figure in black armor, inlaid with lines of gold, a belt with a round, black stone at the clasp, a stone the size of a human heart, and a helmet with two round, insectile eyes and a horned, golden crest. Dr. Beall sounded the all-clear, and the crew poured in to peer and gape at what they had discovered.

Hector, Steve and Dr. Peters were right in the front row of onlookers.

"So… anything in the Chinook stories about this?" said Steve.

"Absolutely nothing," said Dr. Peters. "But I have seen this face, carved amongst the runes. If I have read them properly, this is the body of an ancient hero. A mystic who communed with the spirits of animals. A faceless armored warrior astride some powerful, unknown beast, fighting for humanity against darkness and chaos."

"A masked rider," said Steve.


	2. Prologue, Part 2

"You can't believe it's really a god, can you?" said Frank Nelson, dipping his fries into a pool of ketchup. "I mean, what kind of sense does that make?"

The figure they had discovered that morning – the god, the warrior, the _Shikla_ , nobody could decide what to call it – had been such a tremendous find that nobody on the dig could think of doing any work. The anthropologists said that the skeleton they had uncovered bore an unprecedented series of mutations. The linguists were unable to match the runes on the walls to any written language, ancient or modern. The archaeologists couldn't tell what kind of material the armor was made of, let alone how it had been made. The whole dig was drowning in a morass of questions, theories and rumors so thick that it slowed all movement to a crawl, and turned any prospect of getting actual work done into an elaborate fiction.

So, sometime after lunch, Dr. Beall decided to call it all off, sent some workers into town to pick up a grill, some meat and a few kegs and turned the rest of the day into a giant barbecue. He and his team had just re-written every textbook on early human history. They had probably earned a day off. As the only people on the dig younger than 21, Steve, Hector and Frank had all been relegated to the kids table.

"That's what Dr. Peters, says," said Hector, gesturing across the table with a half-eaten hot dog. "The man's the expert in all the local myths and legends."

"The man's an expert in fantasy," said Frank. Steve was looking back and forth from one side of the table to the other, grinning so widely it threatened to overextend his face. "Those stories are just a ten thousand year game of telephone started by people who thought the sun was a dung beetle. We can't learn anything from that kind of nonsense."

"We found Troy that way," said Hector. "Archaeologists followed the description and the geographical markers in the Iliad, and they found Troy right where Homer said it was."

"They found _a_ city," said Frank. "One city out of a dozen, built on a natural spot to control trade in and out of the black sea. There might have been a battle there, it's in a very strategic location, and one of those battles may have been at the same time as the Iliad says it was. Doesn't mean there was ever a Trojan Horse, or a golden apple, or a battle with the gods taking sides and coming to earth to fight alongside men. Doesn't mean there was ever a Helen, or a Paris, or an Achilles." He smirked over the table. "Or a Hector."

"It sure as hell doesn't mean all that stuff is false, either," said Hector. "If there really was a battle there, how do we know that's not the war Homer based his story on? He could have been telling a mostly true story with just some business about gods added to give it a better cross-demographic appeal? There could still have been a total badass named Achilles who fought another, probably more handsome and charismatic badass named Hector."

"Yeah, but if so, he was just a man," said Frank. "Even if we found the grave of Achilles we're not going to be able to dissect his corpse and figure out how to make invulnerability skin cream."

"No, but the armor is real," said Steve, finally speaking up. "And as is, they have no idea what it's even made of. If they can figure it out what kind of material those ancient people used and how they were able to make it-"

"It would still be several thousand years out of date," said Frank.

"So, our teacher's pet thinks he knows everything, eh?" said Kirsten, sitting down at the table with a half-empty bottle of beer in her hand. Dwayne and Joey came with her, the former carrying three extra beers.

"Here ya go, kids, join the party," said Dwayne, setting the three cans in the middle of the table. "You made us look real good down there today."

"Sweet!" said Hector, grabbing for the closest bottle. Steve slapped his hand away.

"Dude, we could go to jail for that!" said Steve, looking around the table at the three shift leaders. "Hell, you could go to jail for helping facilitate that!"

"This is a pretty big party," said Joey. "Going to be real hard to notice how any one person managed to get their hands on a beer."

"Or remember what happened the day after!" said Kirsten, draining her beer and tossing the empty bottle away to shatter somewhere in the darkness.

"Seriously, man, how can you be so cool all the time but freeze up at one beer?" asked Frank.

"Now that's the first thing you said all day that I agree with," said Hector, the two of them opening their beers simultaneously. Steve looked at the last one left on the table and hesitated for a few moments, considering it, before finally deciding…

"Eh, what the hell," he cracked open a can.

"Yeah, now it's a party," said Dwayne, slapping him on the back so hard he nearly choked.

"And it looks like everyone's invited," said somebody new. The conversation stopped. The mirthful expressions fled from Frank and Joey's faces. Kirsten apparently did not give two craps, but she did put her drink down. Slowly, his blood filling up with dread and his bladder with piss, Steve turned around to see Dr. Keiko Odagiri standing behind him, her hair hanging loose, her arms folded and an expression on her face that could melt steel. Beside Steve, Hector started to choke a little.

"D-Doctor O!" said Steve, trying unsuccessfully to hide an open can of beer without spilling any. "Listen, this… none of it… I can explain!"

Dr. Odagiri said nothing.

"You see… see…" Steve started gesturing to various people around the table in a completely random order. "See these guys! They all said it was okay! And then there was peer pressure from these guys, and that was just too powerful for me to ignore! And then I hadn't actually taken a drink of it yet so _technically_ nothing has really happened… hah… please oh god don't tell my parents."

Dr. Odagiri stared down at him with piercing eyes. Then her lip quivered. Her face broke into a smile. She started laughing, and everyone looked at her like she had just grown an extra pair of heads.

"Oh my god, the look on your face just now," said Keiko, wiping away a tear. "I'm sorry, Steve, I just couldn't resist."

"So… just so we're all clear…" said Hector, cautiously. "…you're cool with this?"

"Oh yeah, it's cool," said Keiko, putting one hand on Steve's shoulder and the other on Hector's. "It's a party! We just changed the face of Neolithic history. In a hundred years, none of the documentaries are going to care about a little underage drinking."

Steve continued to stare blankly up at her.

"Just don't wreck the equipment, don't get so wasted you can't stand up and don't show up for work hungover!" she said, turning and walking away. "And if the cops ask, deny everything!"

Steve turned back to his friends, holding the back of his head in both hands.

"Holy crap, guys…" he said, taking a rather long drink. "Would have been easier just to deal with the cops…"

"Everyone!"

"Oh, Dr. B's giving a speech again," said Joey, turning to face the professor. "You know how he gets if we don't all dance along to his tune."

"Everyone, if I can have a moment of your time…" continued Dr. Beall, his voice barely carrying over the raucous din of the crowd. "…to… commemorate the… momentous…"

He sighed, taking off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose.

"If nobody listens to me I'm going to dump the rest of the beer into Lake Chelan!"

The noise came to a complete halt. Steve swore he could hear the sound of a record scratching.

"That's better," said Dr. Beall, smirking wryly at the crowd. "It's important that we not forget, even in the midst of all this celebration, the significance of what it is we found here today. Archaeology isn't just the study of dusty bones, or rusty tools, or shattered pottery fragments. This is the study of humanity. Nothing less. These artifacts we might find, even the tiniest crumb of pottery, all of it is a clue to how humanity lived in a time that no living human remembers. Through our efforts, we shine a light on the darkest, most forgotten periods in our history. We learn more about our ancestors, we learn more about the way they lived and the choices they had to make, and we learn more about our own lives, and how their actions still influence us today. What we've found here today could very well redefine everything we know about pre-columbian civilization."

Dr. Beall raised a red solo cup of beer in a makeshift toast.

"So, here's to this team, and to the discovery of all of our lifetimes!" he shouted, a cheer rising from the crowd in response. "But don't enjoy yourselves too much. We've still got two dozen burial mounds left in this site, and they aren't going to excavate themselves."

Everyone laughed. It was probably the oldest single joke in the archaeology world, but nobody was in a mood to mind. It did seem a lot less funny just a few seconds later, when the zombies attacked.


	3. Prologue, Part 3

The attack came slow, at first. A shadow crept up to the edge of the camp, hiding in the darkness beyond the artificial lights. A few seconds later there was another, and then another, cloaked in the night and approaching so slowly that none of the archaeologists even noticed anything. Not until the final figure appeared, lurching from the shadows behind Dr. Beall, wrapped in an all-consuming black shroud. Beall turned to stare at the figure, and soon the crew noticed that they were surrounded by two dozen of the faceless shadows. A hush fell over the camp, but the shadows made no move, made no sound, but they could feel the burn of four dozen eyes.

Beall turned to face the approaching shadow, his mouth open to ask a question, but his last words would go unheard. A bone-white arm lashed out from within the shroud, grasping the professor around the throat and lifting him into the air. Steve was frozen where he sat, his eyes wide, his heart twitching, all the blood draining from his face. He didn't see his friends, or the other encroaching shadows. All he could see was his professor, clawing ineffectually at the bone-white arm as it choked the life out of him, his legs flailing and kicking at empty air.

The thing in the darkness raised a second bone-white arm, bearing a golden bracer and a foot-long back-pointed spike. From somewhere within the darkness of its robes, the thing in the darkness spoke with a voice like a thousand screeching insects.

"Rejoice," it said, holding its pale hand to Beall's forehead. "Your flesh shall be my temple."

The bone-white hand thrust into Beall's ribcage, crunching bone like dry twigs and tearing flesh like wet paper. A red glow emerge from within Beall's mouth and nose, his skin starting to blister and blood vessels bursting in his eyes. The thing in the shadows ripped his heart free from his chest and held it to the black sky, the dying muscle charred black from the creature's touch. A shocked gasp rang out from every voice that beheld this.

Then came a scream, piercing the silence and the paralyzing shock that had ensnared the camp. Keiko Odagiri had regained her wits enough to run, screaming, bolting for her very life towards the darkness and the woods beyond. She was wearing a white shirt and khaki slacks, so even with his night vision washed out by the lights of the camp, Steve could see her retreating into the endless darkness. He could see her pounced on and thrown to the ground by a being that seemed to wear that very darkness as armor and wield it as a weapon. Her screams were choked out by a flash of red.

The thing with the bone-white arms seemed pleased. He tossed Beall's body overhand into the crowd, the corpse ploughing through Steve's table and landing amongst the dirt and the splinters, blood pooling out of the hole in his chest. A bolt of lightning shot from the creature's hand and arced through the lights, plunging the campsite into darkness. A noise like the roar of a dozen animals combined into a single voice echoed through the empty night as the attack began in earnest.

"Bye Bye Bye" started playing on the stereo.

No one could see them as they swept down over the camp, running down the fleeing, panicked diggers like wolf among sheep. The music faded into the screams, the screams faded into the horrific, inhuman noises of the attackers, the roars and howls faded to the sound of breaking bone and tearing flesh. There were at least twice as many humans for each attacker, but that made no difference. None of the humans put up any more resistance to the creatures from the night than Dr. Beall did.

Not that they didn't try. Joey Soeprapto had wrestled for Indonesia at Seoul before coming to America. Kirsten Jones was a top contender in a local mixed martial arts league, just on the verge of going pro. Dwayne Lark had been a middleweight boxer until he tore his UCL, but he had kept up in practice and bulked up severely since then. On the weekends the three of them sometimes held fight clubs and could go all night against the rest of the dig crew without breaking a sweat. And sure, they put up a decent fight. They even got a few good hits in. But it was all for nothing, like trying to grind a mountain to dust with their bare knuckles. They crumbled under the weight of their own assault.

Some didn't even have that much presence of mind. Dr. Peters stumbled through the carnage in a daze, eyes wide and mouth open. Men and women were cut down all around him but he was deaf and blind to it, shambling endlessly forward like the walking dead. His mind was broken, shattered, and he was trailing pieces behind him with each step. He barely seemed to notice when a black, winged shadow plunged out of the darkness and swept him up like a helpless baby rabbit.

The creature with the bone-white arms stood apart from this, staring at the death and rampage from within the blackness of his hood, arms folded stoically across his chest. None could say what he might be thinking, but he never once looked away.

Steve watched this from under the remains of his table, cowering under the broken wood with Frank, Hector and the corpse of Dr. Beall. The professor's neck had been bent nearly to a right angle, and his eyeballs had turned bright red. The stench of blood and defecation subsumed the air, and Steve was fighting the urge to vomit. He lost.

Wiping his mouth, he looked up and his gaze fell on the primary dig site, his eyes focusing right past the devastation. A great stone archway, a full two stories tall, carved into the side of the mountain. It had been constructed and designed in a style thousands of years ahead of its time, and the site was littered with great stone bricks and the remains of columns ten feet wide. He and the other diggers had been over every square inch of the site, inside and out. They had excavated every room, gone through every passageway, and opened…

…every…

…door!

"The cave!" Steve whispered, calling out to Frank and Hector. "We need to make a break for the cave!"

"You're crazy, man!" said Frank. "If we go in there we'll be trapped! We may as well paint a bulls-eye on our asses with barbecue sauce!"

"And we're much better out here?" said Hector. "Steve, what are you talking about?"

"There are rooms in there with foot-thick doors made of stone!" said Steve. "If we can shut the door behind us these… things won't be able to get in!"

"They can tear people apart!" said Hector. "How do we know they can't just push down a stone door?"

"We don't!" said Steve. "But I'd give us better odds of surviving than out here!"

"No, no!" said Frank, covering his head. "We just need to stay here and keep quiet! If we keep our heads down, maybe they won't even see us!"

A severed arm dropped to the ground with a wet squelch. It was close enough that Frank could have picked his nose with it.

"…every man for himself!" said Frank, running full-tilt for the door.

"No, Frank!" said Steve. He tried to run after him but Hector grabbed his collar and pulled him back, wrestling him to the ground. Frank got roughly fifteen feet away from the door before one of the creatures swept down out of the darkness and carried him, screaming into the night.

"Go!" said Hector, pulling Steve to his feet. "It's our only chance now!"

The pair ran straight for the door, jumping or dodging around the panicked diggers and evading the creatures of darkness mostly by pure luck. They were close to the cave now, evading death by chance and chance alone, but no fortune was forever. Just as they reached the stairs to the door, a creature with pointed antennae and black, slit eyes plunged out of the darkness, a voluminous membrane spreading out behind him. It landed on Hector with enough force to drive him into the ground. He screamed, and Steve could hear his friend's spine snap.

Steve whirled around in place, seeing the creature crouched on Hector's back, tearing at his ribs and shoulders with clawed hands. Tears welled up in Steve's eyes, and for a second, just a second, he considered running to his friend's aid, hurling himself at the beast in a futile act of sacrifice. But Hector, seeing the expression on his friend's face, summoned up the last reserves of his dying strength.

He raised his hand, pointing at the doorway, and croaked out a single word.

"Go!"

Even then, Steve couldn't bring himself to move, until he saw the second creature. A horrifying beast with wide, bulbous eyes, clawed hands, and four savage horns on either side of its face, staggering through the darkness like a marionette with tangled strings. The starlight gleamed off its carapace as it emerged from the darkness, and Steve felt as though its eyes were staring through him, seeing the whole of his very being in a single glance.

He ran into the cave and never looked back.


	4. Act 1, Part 1

It was two days later. The morning sun was creeping over the peaks of the Cascade Mountains. Police and rescue workers swarmed over the former dig site like rats picking at a corpse. Bodies or parts thereof were strewn over the ground like common litter, and blood painted the dirt a sickly purple-black, like a giant bruise on the earth. Only half the bodies had been left to rot, dismembered or disemboweled or even torn completely in half. The rest were… "in one piece" is the best that could be said of any of them. Whole young trees had been torn from the forest, stripped of their branches and sharpened to a point. Corpses of diggers and researchers had been impaled on the spikes, impaled through the rib cage and out the back. Two dozen of them clustered around the entrance to the cave, a forest of limp, grisly scarecrows, their limbs dangling in the mountain breeze.

Helen Briggs felt herself begin to retch once she came in eyeshot of the scene, but she fought it back. The smell had first hit her halfway up the mountain trail and only become stronger as she had kept ascending, and here it was almost a physical force, a sickening stench of iron and rotted meat that pressed on her chest like twenty feet of ocean water. But the sight of it all… the smell couldn't begin to prepare her. She pushed up her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. Seven-thirty was too damn early for mass murder.

A pair of uniformed officers saw her and her partner approach, and one called out to the detective on scene, a heavyset man with a graying beard and a hairline that had receded to a sad, narrow peninsula. He looked up from the corpse he was studying, brushed the dirt from his knees and looked the two newcomers up and down. Briggs was tall, dark-skinned woman with a severe look on her face and her hair pinned back in a tight bun. Her partner was younger, tan, fresh-faced with short hair. Both of them wore dark glasses and far better suits than his. The detective was very familiar with their type.

"Special Agent Briggs, FBI Violent Crimes Division, Seattle field office," she said, presenting her badge and ID to the detective. "This is my partner, Agent Jimenez." The other agent nodded his head, not saying a word.

"Detective Sergeant Benny Carter, homicide," said the inspector, holding out his hand to the two agents. "I never thought I'd say this, but I hope you're here to kick me and my team out of the investigation."

Briggs and Jimenez looked at each other, then at Detective Carter. The hand was not reciprocated.

"Detective, why don't you give me your rundown of the incident here," said Briggs.

"Haven't you been briefed already?" asked Carter.

"We'd like to hear your version of events," said Briggs. "Make sure everything lines up."

Carter bristled at this, but shrugged, and turned back to the dig site, motioning for Briggs and Jimenez to follow him.

"This used to be a dig site for ESU's archaeology department," said Carter, leading the agents through the bodies, weaving a twisting path through the maze of human remains. "Some kind of ancient burial site, I don't know. Doesn't really matter now. The night before last, people heard screaming and saw some kind of lightning storm on the mountainside, and last morning they missed a scheduled call. Watch your step here."

Carter stepped over a stretch of small intestine that connected the upper and lower halves of a body found 20 feet apart from each other. Briggs and Jimenez paused for a moment before continuing.

"The university called Seattle Mountain Rescue when they couldn't get in touch with anyone," Carter continued, leading the agents to the cluster of impaled corpses. "SMR got here sometime in the afternoon, and found it like… this. Between the response time, the exposure and predation by local wildlife, we can't estimate a time or cause of death beyond 'two nights ago' and 'bloody as all hell.' We can't even tell if some of these wounds are pre- or post-mortem, and we didn't find any gunshot wounds, shell casing or gunpowder residue. And then there's this…"

The three of them stopped at the forest of corpses and looked up at the hanging bodies.

"…none of us know what to make of this," said Carter, running a hand through the tattered remnants of his hair. "Best I can figure it's some kind of ritual thing. Demon worshipers, some kind of crazy Manson Family bullcrap, backwoods cannibal cult… way out of my experience."

"Interesting theories, detective," said Briggs, staring up at the dead bodies, her eyes hidden behind her dark glasses. "Would you give agent Jimenez and I a moment? We need to confer."

"Yeah, sure, have your spy moment," said Carter, shoving his hands in his pockets. "I need about half a dozen smokes anyway."

The detective wandered off, muttering something about crazy secret spy conversations and armies of psychopaths tearing people in half. Alone and in the shadow of the mountain, Briggs and Jimenez took their sunglasses off.

"God, I can barely see in those things," said Jimenez, rubbing his eyes. "Are you sure this is going to work?"

"Trust me, kid," said Briggs, patting him on the shoulder. "Done this a dozen times before. You come in quiet and creepy, doing the whole men in black thing. No first names. They're not going to like you anyway, may as well go along with it. Then you ease up, let a few cracks show, start laughing at their jokes, buy coffee for everyone. Suddenly, you're opening up to them. Suddenly, _they've_ won _you_ over. You catch a lot more flies with vinegar in this business."

"Well you'd know, boss," said Jimenez, fiddling with one of the buttons on his jacket. "It's really hard to say quiet for so long, though."

"It's something you need to learn," said Briggs. "Nothing gets people talking faster than the silent treatment. It's a cliché, but only because it works." She grinned at him. "Also, I've got seniority, so I get to talk. You'll get your turn when you grow up."

"Yes ma'am," Jimenez sighed. "So, what do we think?"

"We don't have the slightest idea," said Briggs, folding her arms tight across her chest. "Carter's right about the ritual thing. You don't go sticking people up on spikes because you want their pin numbers."

"Could be a robbery disguised as a ritual killing."

"Or a ritual killing disguised as a robbery disguised as a ritual killing," said Brigs. "Let's not get into any meta crap."

"I'm going to be right one day," said Jimenez, looking out over the dig site, watching cops and medics trying to piece together body parts, get some idea of just what happened to all these people. "But how did they kill so many people without using guns? How did they tear these people apart? And this… why did they only stake up half of them?"

"We're both ignoring the real mystery here," said Briggs, pointing up at the hanging bodies. "Nobody's going to know what happened here until we figure out why they did _that_."

The corpses on the spike had had their skin flayed, their eyes plucked and the flesh torn from their bones. Twenty-four blind, grinning skulls looked down upon the two agents from the gaping, bloody holes where once they had faces.

"I mean who _does_ that?" said Briggs, staring up into the empty eye sockets that, judging by the hair and clothes, once belonged to a man in his 50's. "…and why did they take the faces with them?"

"Do you think they put them in jars?" asked Jimenez, staring at the ground. "If we find these guys we're going to have to put faces in jars down as evidence. I don't even know if that's on the form."

"Movement!" Briggs drew her gun and pointed it at the cave entrance, her keen eyes picking out a shadow, a patch of movement in the greater darkness. Jimenez drew his gun a second later, and detective Carter took Briggs' other side, flanked by a dozen or so uniformed officers. They stood there, pointing their guns at the entrance to the cave, and the dig was so still that not even the birds made a sound. Nothing happened. The shadow in the cave didn't move.

"…Briggs, are you sure you saw something?" said Carter, his eyes and aim still focused on the cave.

"I know what I saw," said Briggs, and took a step forward. She cleared her throat and spoke in her Official Police Business voice. "Whoever you are, I can tell you're in there! You can either come out now, peacefully, unarmed, or all of us can come in after you, and 'peacfully' and 'unarmed' will be well off the table."

The shadow shifted, but came no closer. Briggs took another step forward, sighting down her handgun at the shape in the darkness.

"…I'm an officer of the law," she said, he voice growing softer. "I give you my word, if you come out here, I'll do everything in my power to help you. Nobody here is going to hurt you unless you make us hurt you."

The shadow shifted, and began to advance. Briggs took a step back, her gun held steady, ever focused on the shadow until it emerged from the entrance to the cave, shading its eyes and blinking in the meager light.

Steve Tooms stepped out of the darkness. His shirt was torn, barely hanging on, and all his exposed flesh was covered in dust, welts and dried cuts. One hand pressed against his abdomen, which bore a massive red scar from one side of his stomach to the other. He tottered forward, collapsing down the stairs on legs that could barely support him.

The police and agents all backed away as though they were a single being, but agent Briggs stepped forward, kneeling down and lowering her gun. Tooms looked up at her through half-lidded eyes and hair falling down into his face.

"…I swear to god, officer," he mumbled, barely able to get the words out. "…I only had the one beer."

His head dropped, and he went completely limp.


	5. Act 1, Part 2

"You got the kid McDonalds?" said Jimenez, looking at the greasy bags in Agent Briggs's hands.

"The kid was probably trapped in there since the attack, he must be starving," said Briggs, looking through the two-way mirror into the interrogation room. "I'm amazed he can even stand up."

Steven was hunched over the table, huddled up under a blanket and detective Carter's borrowed coat. He stared at a blank spot on the table, silent and unblinking, shivering even in the heated room. A medic had seen to his wounds, but apart from the chills the medic could barely find anything wrong with him. It looked as though all his wounds had been healed for several days.

"Giving him something to eat could be just what he needs to snap out of that," Briggs continued. "So I got him burgers, fries, some nuggets, one of those half-assed mcsalads, a pie, a shake, the happy meal toy…"

"All that?"

"I don't know what he likes," Briggs shrugged. "Our only witness and he's catatonic. Let's hope it'll only take some free food to wake him up."

"Do you want me to come in with you?" said Jimenez. "Give him the silent treatment?"

"Yeah, why not," said Briggs, stepping out into the hall. "But don't be the intimidating silent. Be the friendly silent."

Jimenez stared at her.

"No, not like that," she said, and the two of them walked into the interrogation room. Steve didn't look up when they came in, but he twitched when the door slammed shut. Briggs felt slightly reassured at that. Any response was something they could use, some tiny crowbar to pry open his mind. She walked up to the table and set the bags down in front of Steve. "Hello, Steven."

Steve had no response. Briggs opened the bags and started taking out cardboard containers, laying it out in an extremely poor man's buffet.

"Your driver's license said Steven Tooms," she said, setting up the spread and leaving the empty bags on the table. "Do you mind if I call you Steve?"

Steve did not appear to have a preference. Briggs looked at Jimenez, who gave her his best friendly silence. It was at best an aloof noiselessness. Briggs turned back to Steve.

"Says you're from Georgia, Savannah," she said, latching on to whatever bit of personal information she could grab. "I used to live there. Got grandparents and two uncles in Atlanta."

She didn't. In fact, outside of studying at Quantico, reporting to DC and that one ill-advised Jamaican spring break that no living human must ever know about, she hadn't ever been east of the Pacific Time Zone. Steve did not need to know that, nor did he need to know how many grandparents and uncles she had acquired over the years.

Nevertheless, Steve wouldn't take the bait. Briggs set her jaw and sat down at the table opposite him.

"Listen, kid… Steve," she said, looking him in the eye as best as she could. "I can't imagine what must have happened to you last night. In this job, I've seen the worst that people can do to each other. First year in the bureau, I was green out of the academy. Saw a little girl get kidnapped by her mother. She grabbed her from Portland, made a beeline for Vancouver like her ass was on fire. We tracked her down to a motel just a few hours from the border, figured she was going to lay low until the heat went off. The kid's dad found her first. The mom took three GSWs to the head, and we found the dad with the same gun in his mouth. Little girl was hiding in the closet the whole time. Some nights, when it's three in the morning and everything seems wrong with my life, I can see her face. You have the same look in her eyes as she did."

Steve blinked. Just once, but he blinked.

"You're safe now, Steve," Briggs said, leaning in to him. "Whatever happened to you, you're safe now. And we need your help to find whatever did that to all those people."

Steve looked up at her, his eyes sunken and hollow, and seeming to stare somewhere three feet behind Brigg's head.

"Whatever," he said.

"What?" asked Briggs.

"Why did you say 'whatever'?" asked Steve. "Why not 'whoever'?"

Briggs was quiet for a few seconds. She hadn't consciously realized what she had said. Something instinctual had said it, some realization she hadn't even realized yet. Once she had noticed, though, she was suddenly able to put her feelings into words.

"…because nothing human could have done that," she said. Steve looked like he was about to speak, but something caught his eye. A stag beetle, black and horned and shining, the size of Briggs' thumb, had crawled out of one of the discarded fast food bags.

"Oh that is disgusting," said Briggs. "That was in the food. Better not eat anything from the right side of the table."

She brought her fist down on the table, but it never touched the bug. One instant it was there, the next it was gone. Steve was holding it in his cupped palm, turning his hand from side to side as the insect climbed over his fingers. Neither of the agents had seen him move. Jimenez was so startled he nearly spoke.

"…how the hell did you do that?" Briggs asked. "Are you some kind of secret Bruce Lee?"

Steve said nothing, staring endlessly at the tiny beetle, gently stroking its slick black carapace. Briggs and Jimenez' radios squawked into life.

"10-39 all personnel, 10-39," said the nervous voice on the other end. "We have a… I don't think there's a code for this one."

"Agent Briggs, FBI, come back and report," said Briggs, holding the receiver up to her ear. "…I'm sorry, say again?"

The voice said again.

"…what do you mean a spider-man?"

Steve's head snapped up.

*          *          *

 "I mean exactly what I said, agent" said Officer Bowman into his radio. "It's a spider-man."

He held the headset to his ear.

"No, not like the comic book!" he said, waving his arms as though the person on the other end could see him. "It's like a man that's also a spider. I mean, did you ever see _The Fly_? Jeff Goldblum mixed with a fly turns into a monster? Like that, but with a spider."

Bowman held the radio up to his ear. It was very difficult to hear anything on the other end over the noise of officers trying vainly to clear the scene of onlookers.

"No, it's only got two legs," he said. "Only two arms, too."

The voice on the other end of the radio seemed particularly irate.

"Well we think it's a giant spider because of the giant goddamn web!"

The web was indeed both giant and goddamn. It was strung in the air between two skyscrapers, with strands of web as thick as a human leg. The whole thing was wide enough across to snare a low-flying helicopter. It looked as though it was spun by an arachnid the size of a Volkswagen Beetle with legs ten feet long, but the true culprit was almost invisible against the massive tangle of silk. A tiny, green, man-shaped abomination, staring down at the panicked humans with four pairs of round, unblinking eyes.


	6. Act 1, Part 3

"Giant spider web?" asked Jimenez. "This can't be real."

"It's gotta be…" Briggs looked sidelong at Steve, whose eyes were boring deep into her. "…connected."

"You think?"

"Insane crap doesn't happen twice in one week by pure chance," she said, and spoke into her radio. "Officer, create a perimeter around building, but do not engage the… the spider man. My partner and I will report on-scene, what's your location?"

"No!" Steve darted across the table, grabbing Agent Brigg's forearm in a grip like steel cables. Jimenez started to go for his gun, but Briggs motioned for him to stop. "You can't go down there. I don't know what that thing is but it's not human. It's _nothing_ like a human. You're not going to stop this creature, you're just going to give it more victims to choose from."

"Five hundred and sixty thousand," said Briggs. "That's how many it has to choose from in this city alone. The same thing that happened at your dig site could happen at a mall, or a church, or an elementary school. Or we could stop it right here and right now."

"You can't stop it!" Steve's voice was cracking and plaintive, almost begging the agents to listen to him, waving his free arm like a cult leader evangelizing to his flock. "Nothing you have can stop him!"

His wild gesticulations flung the beetle out of his hand. It tumbled wildly through the air, hit Briggs in the center of her forehead and landed on its back on the table, legs flailing uselessly in the air. Briggs sighed.

"Let go of my arm, Tooms," she said, her voice low but firm as granite.

"I can't let you go!" said Steven.

"You don't have a choice, kid," she said. "Right now you're assaulting a federal agent, that's a class D felony. I could have Jimenez here put you in a cell until we're good and done with you. Or, you could take a deep breath, count to ten and let me go; and I could look the other way and maybe have a chance of doing my goddamn job."

Steve blanched for a moment, and his grip loosened. Briggs was able to wrench free, but Steve darted forward again, his hand clasping on her bare wrist.

There was a spark when they touched, like a jolt of static electricity, and then everything went black.

_Darkness. Moving darkness. Stone walls against my hands, stone steps beneath my feet. Downward. Down and in. The inner chamber._

_Behind me. It follows. Shaped like a man. Moving like an insect. Leaping from wall to wall. Crawling on the ceiling. The noise. Fingernails down my bones. The eyes. Always staring._

_The thing jumps. Duck! Hide! Stone pillar, on the wall. Claws like lightning. Stone crumbles. A cry of anger. Run! Run fast. Run deep. Don't stop._

Helen blinked. She was back in the interrogation room. She realized that she had never left. Her eyes were wide, and Steven's had shrunk to tiny black pinpricks. She could see herself reflected in them. Gradually, she became aware of Jimenez, shaking her by the shoulders and calling her name.

"Helen!" he cried. "Helen!"

"I'm fine… Jimenez," she said, her hand slipping from Steve's limp fingers. "Did you see that?"

"See what?" asked Jimenez. "You two just froze there for a minute. What happened?"

"I don't know," she said, staring across the table at Steve. His eyes had once again gone flat, he barely seemed to acknowledge the presence of anyone else in the room. "…I think he told me something."

"He told you something?" asked Jimenez. "What are you talking about?"

"I don't know how to explain and we don't have time to try," she said, and spoke into her radio. "10-39… um… damn, I didn't get his name. 10-39, the officer with the giant spider web, come back, officer with the giant spider web!"

*          *          *

"That's Officer _Bowman_ , thank you," said the officer with the giant spider web. "What's the situation?"

"I need you to pull all your men back," Briggs said over the radio. "Double the size of the perimeter and hold position until the SWAT team deploys."

"You're calling in a SWAT team?" Bowman replied. "For what, a publicity stunt?"

"Officer, this is connected to an ongoing federal investigation," Briggs shouted over the radio. "This whole situation is my call, not yours, not your sergeant's, not even your goddamn commissioner's. This is a direct order: Pull back and wait for backup or you are going to die."

"…right, you heard the lady!" Bowman shouted, signaling for the fallback. "Everyone pull back, we're increasing the perimeter to the whole city block!"

"We don't have enough manpower for that!" said another officer.

"Call in everyone you can get a hold of, we need to keep this thing contained!"

"Bowman, look!" an officer pointed at the center of the web. Bowman looked up, shielding his eyes.

The tiny figure at the center of the web was moving. Bowman could barely make it out at this distance, but it was doing something, skittering back and forth over the web like… well, like a giant human spider crawling over a massive cobweb. Some things just can't be described in any other way, and Bowman was far too busy to think of a more poetic simile.

The web twitched, and the spider leapt forward like a shot from a catapult. Bowman ducked to the side at the last second and saw the spider-thing's ugly green carapace streak past him, filling the air with the stench of rotten meat. It missed Bowman, but two other officers who tried to duck weren't so lucky. The creature dug its claws into their backs and pulled them into a deadly embrace. A line of web tied around its waist snapped like a bungee cord and all three vanished back into the sky.

"What happened?" Bowman drew his gun. The air was filled with sounds of confusion and panic, but Bowman just stared up at the giant web. He could see two figures against the webbing, the unfortunate policemen struggling against their bonds, but the human spider had gone. "We've lost the perp! I can't find the perp!"

The spider landed on the car behind him, claws digging into the metal, feet landing hard enough to dent the roof. Armed cops scattered, pulling their guns on the creature, Bowman retreated until he backed into a car and collapsed into a sitting position.

The creature stood to its full height. Its body was an ugly, sickly green, and naked but for a broad, tarnished necklace and a faded loincloth with a thick, black belt. Three-inch claws sprouted from the backs of its hands and eight curved horns framed its grotesque face, fanning out like a spider's limbs. Its eyes were completely inhuman, with a pair of shiny, black, softball-sized globes protruding from its face and two smaller pairs flanking them. It mouth was bulbous and lipless, and split open on a vertical, revealing a sickly, fleshy, toothless maw that dripped with phlegm. But yet there was the semblance of a pair of human eyes in the marking on its face, and protruding, beaked nose that bore no nostrils, and even what looked like a strip of black hair and a thin beard. Bowman thought it looked like one species was trying to become the other.

"Where is the marked one?" the creature spoke with a voice like someone had taught a malfunctioning steam boiler how to talk. "Bring me to him or die at my hand."

"Open fire!" Bowman discharged his gun at the creature. Three feet away, center of mass, a blind person could have got a confirmed kill. Two bullets hit in the left breast, right over the creature's heart. More cops joined in, peppering the creature with shots on his stomach, his back, his shoulders. All of them pitted into his flesh like stones thrown into wet sand.

"You have made your choice," the creature threw back his arms and flexed his muscles, and the bullets popped out of his skin, pooling between his feet. Bowman nearly dropped his gun in panic.

The monster leapt off the car and into the throng of officers, punching the nearest one so hard it shattered the window behind his head. He whirled on the next one and slashed at his back, the force of the blow sending him flying over a car, landing with a bone-shattering impact on the pavement. A third tried to crawl away, but the spider pounced on him and reduced half his face to a bloody mess with a single swipe of his hand. Each movement, each strike, each blow from the spider's hands left an officer limp on the ground, and soon the creature was surrounded by the corpses of its attackers.

Bowman had somehow escaped the spider's notice, but the sight of such a peerless foe had drained the courage from his blood, and scrambled on all fours for the nearest patrol car. The tires spun on the pavement as he frantically worked the accelerator, gunning the car up to speed and smashing through a barricade. He breathed a sigh of relief as the massacre faded into the distance behind him, and he reached for the handset radio.

"10-39 Agent Briggs, this is Bowman, come back!" he shouted into the microphone, grasping at it like a drowning man grasps at a rope. "Officer down, multiple officer down! The spider-"

There was a sound of breaking glass and his breath caught in his throat. A thick, white strand of spider web wrapped around his neck, pinning him back to his headrest and choking him like a noose made of steel wire. In his rearview mirror he saw the spider creature, coming up the line so fast he wasn't even touching the ground. Then it went mercifully dark.

*          *          *

"Bowman, come back!" Briggs shouted into her radio, but all she could hear was what she was going to say sounded like static. "Bowman, repeat your status! What's happening?"

The radio went dead. Briggs and Jimenez looked at each other in silence.

"Get an APB out!" said Briggs, slamming her two-way down on the table. "I want every cop in the city looking for that bastard. That cop-killing man-spider can't hide!"

"Oh, I don't want to hide," said a strange voice from the radio, a screeching, hissing, high-pitched voice that scraped along the spine via the ear canal. "I want to find you. And I know exactly where you are!"

Brigg's mouth dropped open. Steve's eyes went wide, and he let out a panicked squeal.

"I saw you take him," the voice continued, making Steve shrink back in fear. "I was weak then, I had to hide, but now I am strong. And I was watching you. Are you listening now, marked one? I saw them take you. I saw them try to hide you. I know exactly where you are, Steven Tooms!"


	7. Act 1, Part 4

"Oh my god…" Steve was clutching his trembling shoulders, hunched over under the blanket, eyes staring somewhere three feet through the table. "That thing's coming for me. It saw me and now it won't let me go. I can't get away. You all need to run."

"Steve, look at me," said Briggs, leaning across the table. "…Steve?"

Steve looked up, but only far enough to stare at the slowly congealing pile of fast food. Briggs sighed, and took his head in both her hands, forcing him to look her in the eye. She may have heard something crack, but she must have been imagining it.

"Now _look_ at me!"

"I'm looking I'm looking!" Steve gasped out, his face pale. Briggs let go, and Steve rubbed his neck.

"I need to know what you know, Steve," she said, the intensity of her brown eyes keeping Steve's gaze locked on her. "You're the only person who's seen one of these things and lived. And if that… that thing that happened was right, you survived this exact creature. I need to know what you did Steve, because that's our only chance of getting you out of this alive."

"I… I don't know!" Steve said, clutching the table so hard his nails dug into the finish. "All I remember was that it was dark and that thing was chasing me. I ran into the main burial chamber, the one we had just uncovered. I… I had this stupid idea to hide inside the sarcophagus. Then… then I don't know what happened. There was this blinding light and then everything went black, like a solid fog of darkness. The next thing I remember I was coming out of the cave and you all were pointing guns at me."

"Wonderful," Briggs said, burying her face in her palm. "Of course this can't be easy. Jimenez, we're going to need to get Steve here into protective custody."

"You want me to take him down to holding?"

"No, we shouldn't move him yet," said Briggs, standing up. "Not until we can get him under guard. You keep an eye on him, I'm going to round up some uniforms to babysit him."

"Wait, you can't do this!" said Steve, jumping to his feet and grabbing Briggs's shoulder. Instinctively she jumped back away from his touch, and they both looked a little embarrassed. "If… if you try to protect me, that monster is going to go through you and your partner and anyone else that stands in his way. Nothing you can do will stop him!"

Briggs stared at him for a few tense seconds. Nothing could be heard in the room except for Steve's panicked breathing. The ice settled in the soda cup. Jimenez stifled a cough into his fist. The beetle on the table frantically waved its legs in the air, trying in vain to roll itself off of its black shell. Finally, Briggs opened her mouth.

"Do you want to die that badly?"

"…w…what?" Steve had no idea how to answer that.

"Listen to yourself, Steve," Briggs said, putting her hand on his shoulder. "Do you really think you stand a chance against that thing? Any more than any of us? You don't have a gun, you're like a hundred and five pounds, and you haven't eaten in days. Going out there would be nothing less than suicide, and I didn't get into this business to let people go off and kill themselves. But if you let us protect you then all of us, you, me, all of these officers, we at least have a chance of saving all our lives and stopping this damn thing before anyone else gets hurt."

Steve looked away, his eyes falling to the floor.

"You feel weak, Steve," Briggs continued. "That monster made you feel like you'll never be strong again. But you don't need to be strong right now. I became an agent to protect people like you from monsters, whether they look like giant spiders or not, and so did every cop in this building. Let us be strong for you."

Steve raised his head to meet her gaze, but he kept silent.

"I'm going to take that as consent," she said. "Alright we've wasted enough time with motivational speeches. Jimenez, here. Me, backup."

"Copy that," said Jimenez. Briggs slammed the door behind her, Jimenez stood in front of it, pistol in hand, and Steve found himself staring at the agent's mirrored sunglasses. He turned around to escape that reflection, and found himself looking right at the interrogation room's wall-sized one-way mirror. He sighed.

The beetle was still squirming on the table where it had rebounded off Briggs' face. Steve reached down for it, the insect's legs latching on to the tip of his finger. He scooped the bug up into his hand, and from there into the pocket of his jeans. It wormed its way down and curled up in the darkest corner like it was making a tiny nest.

"So… Jimenez, right?" said Steve, wrapping the blanket closer around him as he approached the other agent. "…is there a first name with that?"

"Not at the moment, no," said Jimenez. "Listen, kid, the truth is, we need you as much as you need us. You're the only witness and the only one with even the damndest idea what happened. You may be the only person who can break this goddamn thing."

"You may be right," Steve sighed. "Listen, I'm sorry about this."

"Sorry about what?" asked Jimenez.

Faster than Jimenez could see, Steve's hands shot out and grasped the agent by the temples. He felt a tiny spark where Steve's fingers touched his head, and then –

_Fear. Pain._

_Fear. Pain. Fear. Pain._

_FEAR. PAIN. FEAR. PAIN. FEAR. PAIN._

_FEARPAINFEARPAINFEARPAINFEARPAINFEARPAINFEARPAIN **FEARPAINFEARPAIN!**_

Jimenez cried out, clutching at his head. In his mind, he was six years old, and Hector LaVonne was holding him down, dangling a scorpion over his eye. He was nine, watching his dog snap the leash and running out in front of a pickup truck. Shattering his femur in high school. His grandmother, frail and ravaged by lung cancer. Coming home early, finding Stephanie in their bed with another man. The first time he had to shoot a suspect, watching him collapse to the ground as the bullet went through his chest. All of these and a thousand more went through his mind in a matter of seconds, every one as vivid as if he was living through them for the first time. He collapsed into the corner, a stream of saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth.

"…for that," said Steve, patting the agent on the head. "You'll be okay… you won't even remember that… I hope."

Steve first tried the door, but it was locked. Then he tried the door five more times, and continually found it to be locked.

"Okay, not working," said Steve, looking around the room for another option. He saw the mirror and stared, tilting his head to one side. "No… no no no… that's crazy. That is not going to work."

His reflection stared back at him. The two shared a private thought.

"God dammit," Steve said. He took the blanket from around his shoulders and wrapped it around his right arm, making a foot-thick cocoon centered on his fist. He took a deep breath, and then another, and then a third. "I am going to regret this…"

He wrenched his eyes shut and punched the mirror. His fist went clean through it, shattering the ballistic glass like it was balsa wood. Steve barely had a second to disbelieve what he had just done, vaulting into the empty room beyond, finding the door unlocked and running out into the hall.

Roughly thirty seconds passed, and Steve ran back into the room, jumped back through the broken mirror, grabbed a Big Mac from the table and shoveled it into his mouth in two bites.

"Oh my god yesssssss," he said, secret sauce dripping from his chin as he upended a carton of fries directly into his face. "Oh yes, _this_ I will not regret."

He grabbed the 20 piece chicken nugget box and jumped back through the shattered mirror.


	8. Act 1, Part 5

The police station was new. Modern. Clean. All the Starbucks money flowing into the city had given it enough financial support to completely rebrand their law enforcement divisions. No more ugly stone wars, no more bare wooden desks, no more cramped lobbies, now it was open space, plate glass windows and a wide central staircase leading up to the actual offices. It was sleek, efficient and, for a government building, aesthetically pleasing.

"Oh what the crap is this?" said Briggs, as she walked down the main stairs, into the gently milling crowd of officers, detectives, civilians and even a few scattered lawyers that had congregated there. "I've built snow forts more secure than this building!"

"This ain't a warzone, missy," said Carter, hurrying along a few steps behind. "This is a police station in a major city. Anyone who comes into a building with more cops than toilets to try and start something has gotta be a complete nutjob. And ten seconds later he's going to be a dead nutjob."

"He's either a nutjob or he's bulletproof," said Briggs. "And this thing could be both."

"Yeah, the giant, cop-killing man-spider," said Carter. "You can't be serious with this X-Files nonsense."

"You got any idea what killed those officers?" said Briggs. "I've never seen anything like the scene at that dig site, I heard _something_ go after Bowman, and just five minutes ago I… well, I had an experience with that man in the interrogation room that I don't think I can explain, even to myself."

Carter raised an eyebrow.

"I'm fully aware of how that sounded," she said. "We need to get these people out of here. Have the uniforms get the civilians out of here. Put them in holding, get them in the basement, shove them in broom closets, wherever they will fit. …keep the whole spider thing quiet."

"Of course," said Carter, tapping a nearby uniformed cop on the shoulder and giving him a few quiet orders.

"You and me, we have to get the security grate shut," Briggs continued. "That could buy us some time until the SWAT team is ready."

"How much time do we have?" said Carter, the room steadily emptying out.

"I don't know," Briggs said, unlocking the steel grate that covered the plate glass doors to the building. "That thing knows where we are, but a giant man-spider is going to have some trouble getting from point A to point B. Should at least have a few minutes to spare."

A police car turned into the parking lot, lights flashing, sirens blaring, engine roaring flat-out.

"…is that one of ours?" said Carter. "What the hell is he doing?"

The car was swerving back and forth like the driver had a fifth of vodka in him with a chaser of lead-based paint. Briggs and Carter winced as it sideswiped a row of parked cars, leaving a trail of shattered taillights and dismembered bumpers in its wake. Briggs squinted into the glare on the windshield. The car passed beneath the shadow of a tree, and just for a second she caught a flash of sickly green skin and bulbous black eyes.

And she knew it saw her too.

"No more time," she said, pulling Carter away from the door. Tires screamed and kicked up white smoke as the stolen car accelerated into the doors. "Down! Everyone down!"

The car ploughed through the plate-glass wall and into the lobby, the thick panes shattering into a thousand tumbling shards, glinting in the light like razor-sharp snowflakes. The officers dived for cover, and Briggs and Carter shielded their eyes as jagged fragments smashed all around them. One officer couldn't get out of the way in time, and the car sent him tumbling head first into a desk. The car kept going until it hit the staircase and bounced off, leaving the hood crumpled and spouting steam. Then it went still.

Briggs and Carter pointed their guns at the car, and a dozen other officers followed suit. Civilians fled out the shattered doors, clutching at deep red cuts on their arms or their legs, screaming in a dozen voices at once. Slowly, the driver-side door opened. The creature within crawled out, crouching with bare hands and feet on a field of glass shards like it was walking on shag pile carpeting. It stood up to its full height and surveyed the room, black eyes gleaming, cobweb horns standing tall, horrible mouthparts twitching open and shut like it was tasting the air.

Carter's hands were shaking, and Brigs could feel the knots forming in her stomach. This thing looked… wrong. It was somewhere between man and arachnid, but she couldn't tell where the one species ended and the other began. It looked like a human wearing the skin of a spider, or a spider wearing the bones of a human.

None of the officers moved. None of them was willing to take the first shot, with this hybrid _thing_ standing in the middle of their sanctum. So it moved first. A single claw swipe sent a policewoman spinning to the ground, and a second dropped the man beside her. Briggs opened fire, Carter too, and every other cop joined in, but the creature barely seemed to notice the hail of gunfire.

The creature looked slow, and it would walk towards an officer with heavy, ponderous strides as bullets bounced off its thick, sickly hide, only to strike out with lightning speed and titanic strength, dropping an officer before he even saw the attack. It would jump and spin to catch a moving target, clambering over the bulk of the wrecked car like an ape to pounce on its next victim, and then it would plod forward again, advancing on its next target with all the patient inevitability of a glacier. Briggs was almost entranced by the thing, so engrossing in its alien nature that she almost couldn't think to call for backup. Almost.

"Code 11 alert, I say again, Code 11," said Briggs, backed into a tiny alcove and temporarily outside of the creature's line of sight. "The target is in the building and we have multiple officers down! Where the hell is that damn swat team?"

The creature turned its head. He dropped the officer he was holding and made a line straight for Briggs's hiding spot. Carter came up from behind a trash can, firing round after round at the spider-thing, but the monster just pushed him to the ground, not even bothering to kill him. The creature rounded the corner and stared down at Briggs, his grotesque, alien face completely unreadable.

"I know you," it said. Briggs raised her gun but the creature was faster, grasping her neck with one rough hand and lifting her off her feet, slamming her back into the alcove wall. Briggs was tall, but her feet dangled a full eight inches off the ground, and her face began to flush. "Your voice was carried along the air. You carried my prize away. You know where Tooms is."

Briggs kicked limply at the air, one hand reaching up to claw at the creature's iron-hard forearm. The other hand had a gun in it, and was currently pointed upwards into what would be the monster's rib cage. She pulled the trigger, and didn't stop until the monster wrenched the pistol from her hand.

"You have… potential," said the creature, its gaping mouth splitting open in a vertical, fanged smile. "You would make a truly worthy vessel."

"No!" the spider turned to see where this new voice had come from. The thing hissed, and dropped Briggs to the ground. She crumpled into a corner, gasping for air. Steven Tooms was standing in the middle of the carnage, holding a blanket and an empty box of chicken nuggets. "It's me you want."


	9. Act 1, Part 6

Steve looked like he was about to speak, but something caught his eye. A stag beetle, black and horned and shining, the size of Briggs' thumb, had crawled out of one of the discarded fast food bags.

**_Tooms_ ** _._

"Oh that is disgusting," said Briggs. "That was in the food. Better not eat anything from the right side of the table."

**_TOOMS_ ** _._

She brought her fist down on the table, but it never touched the bug. One instant it was there, the next it was gone. Steve was holding it in his cupped palm, turning his hand from side to side as the insect climbed over his fingers. Neither of the agents had seen him move. Jimenez was so startled he nearly spoke.

"…how the hell did you do that?" Briggs asked. "Are you some kind of secret Bruce Lee?"

Steve said nothing, staring endlessly at the tiny beetle, gently stroking its slick black carapace. Briggs and Jimenez' radios squawked into life.

"10-39 all personnel, 10-39," said the nervous voice on the other end. "We have a… I don't think there's a code for this one."

"Agent Briggs, FBI, come back and report," said Briggs, holding the receiver up to her ear. "…I'm sorry, say again?"

The voice said again.

"…what do you mean a spider-man?"

**_Steven Tooms._ **

Steve's head snapped up.

He heard the words over the radio, on some level, but it was muffled and indistinct, as though he was hearing them from underwater. He saw Briggs and Jimenez, too, staring at their radios, but they were faded and transparent, like the reflections on a window looking out into the blackness of the night.

And in that blackness, there was the beetle.

It hovered in the air at eye-level, floating in an endless abyss, its skin shining like polished metal even though there was no light to be seen. Its shell was a gleaming mirror-black like polished obsidian, and it bore shining gold strikes on its curved back and a three-pronged golden crest upon its broad head. It long, silver legs hung weightlessly in the empty space, and it bore a pair of gleaming, curved, silver mandibles, each one half as the beetle's entire body. Its eyes were black, ringed with gold, and they bored into Steven like an industrial drill.

In the darkness, the emptiness, Steven couldn't tell how big it was. At first, it seemed to be no bigger than the beetle in his hand, hovering but an inch from his face. An instant later it filled his vision from one perimeter to the other, and he seemed no larger than a body floating in space, staring down at a planetary expanse beneath him. If he was actually inhabiting his physical body at this point, he might have voided his bowels.

**_STEVEN TOOMS._ ** _  
_

"I… I…" Steve said, his mouth or the mental perception of having a mouth operating without any input from his brain, or the mental perception of having a brain. Without direct control, his body fell back into its familiar patterns. "…present?"

**_YOU ARE ASLEEP, STEVEN TOOMS._ **

The beetle's voice was not something he heard. There was no air to transfer sound, nothing to make his earlobes twitch, and no actual ears to hear with. The words came directly from the beetle to his brain, but could not be restrained to his auditory perceptions. They bounced around every lobe and cortex of his brain like a verbal seizure, traveling down his spine and to every receptor in his nervous system. He could feel this voice as though it were an earthquake, and the epicenter was his beating heart.

**_SOON YOU WILL WAKE, AND THE DREAMING SHALL END. BUT FIRST MUST COME THE NIGHTMARES._ **

The sights and sounds of the temporal world came into sharper focus, and Steven could once more see them fully. He was being allowed to see them.

"Giant spider web?" asked Jimenez. "This can't be real."

**_THEY MUST BE WARNED_.**

"It's gotta be…" Briggs looked sidelong at Steve, whose eyes were boring deep into her. "…connected."

**_THEY CANNOT FIGHT YOUR BATTLES._ **

"You think?"

**_SPEAK, STEVEN TOOMS._ **

"Insane crap doesn't happen twice in one week by pure chance," she said, and spoke into her radio. "Officer, create a perimeter around building, but do not engage the… the spider man. My partner and I will report on-scene, what's your location?"

**_SPEAK OR THEY WILL DIE!_ **

"No!" Steve darted across the table, grabbing Agent Brigg's forearm in a grip like steel cables. Jimenez started to go for his gun, but Briggs motioned for him to stop. "You can't go down there. I don't know what that thing is but it's not human. It's _nothing_ like a human. You're not going to stop this creature, you're just going to give it more victims to choose from."

"Five hundred and sixty thousand," said Briggs. "That's how many it has to choose from in this city alone. The same thing that happened at your dig site could happen at a mall, or a church, or an elementary school. Or we could stop it right here and right now."

"You can't stop it!" Steve's voice was cracking and plaintive, almost begging the agents to listen to him, waving his free arm like a cult leader evangelizing to his flock. "Nothing you have can stop him!"

His wild gesticulations flung the beetle out of his hand.

**_Steven, no!_ **

It tumbled wildly through the air, hit Briggs in the center of her forehead and landed on its back on the table, legs flailing uselessly in the air. Briggs sighed.

**_Help me, Steven! My body is tiny and helpless!_ **

*          *          *

Steve was thundering down the emergency stairwell now, the beetle still floating in his mind's eye, at a much more reasonable fraction of infinity. It buzzed around his head, shouting into his brain, but all he could hear was his own pounding heart. Halfway down the stairs he collapsed into a panting heap on a landing, huddled and gasping under the police-issue blanket. The air was cold, and he pressed his arms to his bare chest for warmth, but he was sweating from the exertion.

**_Get up, Steven Tooms. You must continue._   
**

"Just… just a minute," said Steve, not yet sure that the thing he was seeing was even real. "I can't keep going like this."

**_You have much further yet to go._ ** _  
_

"At least let me eat…" said Steven, opening his box of nuggets. He bit down into the processed chicken and his stomach bit him back. He had been hungry before, but it had been so long that he was all but immune to the pangs from his gut. Now they came back in full, twitching and cramping and pounding on his diaphragm like a bass drum. He felt like he was going to give birth to an alien parasite, heaving and threatening to vomit with every bite he took, but he was so hungry that he couldn't even stop himself.

**_Build your strength, for you will be sorely tested._ **

"What… what the hell are you?" said Steven, trying to focus on the spectral insect hovering before him. "Some kind of spirit animal?"

**_I am the part of the infinity that has awoken to your mind. I am that of the cosmos which is in synchronicity with your soul._ **

Steve blinked. The beetle stared at him. Steve ate a chicken nugget. The beetle lowered its head, shaking his pinchers from side to side.

**_Yes, Steven, I am your spirit animal_.  
**

"Okay, then," said Steve. "Then how did I do that thing in there? How did I make them see those things?"

**_You wished your thoughts known to them, and so they were._ **

"What, just like that?" said Steve. "Like some magical genie?"

**_You drink from a well that has no end. You but sip now, soon you shall gorge to your fill._ **

"And those… those things at the camp?" said Steve, staring the beetle in the eyes, his jaw quivering at the memory of it all. "What are those? How did they find me? What is it aft-"

**_You have questions when you need certainty. You must rise and you must fight. When you survive, you will have earned the wisdom you seek._   
**

"If I survive."

**_WHEN. YOU. SURVIVE._ **

Stephen found himself pulled to his feet like a puppet dragged up by its strings, flying down the stairs in a barely constrained collapse. He half expected that each next step would see his head dashed open on the floor, but whatever force kept him moving forward kept his head upright. And always, there was the voice.

**_YOU ARE THE CHOSEN OF YOUR SPECIES. YOU WILL BE THE LIGHT WHEN ALL AROUND IS EMPTY NIGHT. YOU WILL HAVE NO FEAR, FEEL NO PAIN._ **

He jumped down the last few stairs and burst forth into a room strewn with the dead. Broken glass and bodies carpeted the floor, and the smoking wreck of a car had been dashed against a staircase. All around him was the stench of death and the cries of the wounded.

**_YOU SHALL BE TRANSFORMED._ **

He stumbled through the carnage with glazed eyes, barely cognizant of what he was seeing. A mass of white marble, black uniforms and blood fading from red to brown that blurred together like an Escher tessellation. He didn't recognize what he was seeing until he saw the creature.

The spider-creature, the thing that had pursued him through the cave. He hadn't seen it in the light, he would barely have recognized his skin, or his face, or his crest of spider-legs, but couldn't forget that deathly smell, or the living fear that welled up inside his heart. The creature hadn't seen him yet. His attention was elsewhere, focused on the woman he was holding against a wall, choking the life from her throat. Briggs.

Steve heard gunshots, and the fog had cleared from his mind. He felt the same animate force welling up inside of him, but now he was in agreement with it.

"You have… potential," said the creature, its gaping mouth splitting open in a vertical, fanged smile. "You would make a truly worthy vessel."

"No!" the spider turned to see where this new voice had come from. The thing hissed, and dropped Briggs to the ground. She crumpled into a corner, gasping for air. Steven Tooms was standing in the middle of the carnage, holding a blanket and an empty box of chicken nuggets. "It's me you want."


	10. Act 1, Part 7

The spider hit Steve so hard he landed in the parking lot. He hit the side of a police van and bounced off onto the pavement like a slab of steak thrown at a wall. Onlookers, drawn by the car plowing into the police station, were drawn to him as he lay on the ground, but scattered in all directions as the spider-thing leapt from the building, landing on hands and feet like a pouncing animal.

Steve had the wind knocked from him, and he was surprised that a blow that should have crushed his skull to gravel merely bruised, and all he could do was try to inch and roll away as the monster drew closer. The spider jumped at him, kicking him in the stomach and forcing out what little air Steve had left. With no more effort than if it were lifting a stuffed doll, the monster grabbed Steve and threw him again and again into the side of the same van, before tossing him to the ground like a rag.

The voice of the Beetle pounded in Steve's mind, telling him to fight, to kill, to do so much as stand up, but he couldn't hear it any more. He just wanted to get away, crawling limply across the pavement by his fingertips. The spider would give him no such mercy.

_The thing jumps. Duck! Hide! Stone pillar, on the wall. Claws like lightning. Stone crumbles. A cry of anger. Run! Run fast. Run deep. Don't stop._

"You were my prize," the humanoid thing said, bearing down on Steve like a spreading thunderhead. "And you led me to the belt."

_Down into the chamber. A door there, shut it! Heavy stone, but weighted to slam shut. Push. Push with everything. Hide inside. Wait it out. Pounding. Pounding on the door. It can't hold._

"It was to be mine!" the spider kicked Steve like a football and he sailed into a parked car. " _You_ were to be mine. Had I known you were such a coward I would have just eaten your heart."

_Sealed in. Boxed in. One way in, no way out. Trapped in here, dying in here. Stupid plan, stupid, stupid, stupid! Breaking the door down. Nowhere to run. No way to survive. Need to fight._

"So insignificant," the spider stalked over, bringing his foot down on Steve's chest. "A weakling that needs a corpse to fight for him!"

_Dust rises from the tomb. Old bones creak. A smell of rot and earth. Armored limbs rising after uncounted ages. A flash of shining black, a cry of inhuman pain, and a single glimmer of hope._

Steve twisted his body, his fist lashing out in one last futile gesture of defiance. In the instant before the blow hit, Steve's hand… Steve's hand did something that was difficult for him to comprehend. For a split second, it looked blurry, or cloudy, as though it was no longer completely solid. And there was pain, but also numbness, like stubbing a toe when the foot is asleep. And just for that tiny moment in time, he was cognizant of his bones, his muscles, his nerves, his tendons and his blood, all of it coming apart so rapidly only to briefly come back together in a new form.

From his left elbow down, his arm was encased in a kind of hard, black shell that formed to his body like armor. On his forearm and the back of his hand were solid white plates like a gladiator's arm-guard, banded with a golden wrist band and a pure white gem. This armored fist stuck the spider dead in the center of the sternum. This time, the beast that had shrugged off bullets like they were foam darts, finally appeared to notice his attack, jumping back from the blow as though it had shocked him. His face was static and lacked expression, but his pose showed confusion.

Steve stared at his hand, twitching his fingers just to see if they were really his.

"…holy crap."

**_Rise, Steven. You become the savior of your race._ **

He clenched his armored fist. The spider was still shocked and he attacked again, his other arm spawning identical armor all the way up to a white, rounded pauldron on his shoulder. A kick at the spider's waist and his leg grew ink-black armor with gold at the knee and ankle. With each attack, each hostile movement, the armor spread over his body, growing more and more intricate as it transformed him. Black legs and abdomen, with a white breastpiece bearing sculpted musculature. A full, black helm with a silver mouthpiece and round, insectlike eyes, topped with a curved, golden crest upon the forehead. Last to appear was a thick, metal belt around Steven's waist, with a brilliant, fist-sized red gem in the center.

His blows drove the spider back, until it was driven to his knees, hissing like a cornered snake. Steve was doing no better. His skin felt heavy and numb, his chest tight, his breath stifled. Every muscle ached like he had been stretched on a torture rack and left to hang. His eyes… everything he saw was red, and his vision was stretched and distorted like stereoscopic fish-eye lenses. He collapsed to the ground and stared at his new arms and legs like a drunk at a funhouse mirror, barely able to tell what shape he was in.

The Spider got to his feet before Steve did, staring at the confused, armored figure.

"You bring forth your second skin," said the creature. "You wear the mask of the rider. It seems I have judged you too soon."

He ran at Steve, clotheslining him before he could regain his senses. Steve tried to rise but the spider struck him in the stomach, and then the chest, staggering him with blows so fierce that Steve couldn't even react. A spinning kick to the head and then a double-handed blow to the sternum was all it took to end this. Steve was hurled bodily through the air, landing on the opposite side of van he had first dented.

"Come, warrior!" the monster shouted, running towards Steve's prone form. Getting to his feet, Steve barely limped away, ducking out of sight behind the oversize van. The spider shook his head, crossing over to his side. "After all that are you still a coward?"

The van started to move. The spider tilted his head to one side. He wasn't sure if he had just seen that or not. No, it moved… just a foot, and then another. The spider only partly understood the operation of these strange wheeled conveyances the humans used, but he was sure they couldn't move by themselves.

…could they?

It gained speed at a rather alarming rate. By the time he had fully comprehended what the thing was it was already upon him. The van slammed into him, hitting him square in the face with three tons of metal. Steve didn't stop pushing it until the rear end was embedded in the side of the police station.

"May be a coward…" panted Steve, his voice tinny and muffled from his armor. "…but I'm a damn strong coward."

He turned and walked away, head hung and arms limp. The van… the van was just goddamn _heavy_ , was what it was. Though he had somehow found the strength inside of him to push it, it hadn't gotten a single ounce lighter. It had taken every last bit of power he had just to move it a scant twenty yards.

And, behind him, it was moving again.

**_DO NOT REST. YOUR FOE STILL LIVES._ **

Steven looked over his shoulder and saw the van barreling down on him like it was possessed, the spider hurling it at him like a wheeled missile. Frantic, Steve rolled out of the way, coming up into a one-handed crouch. Save for some dust and stone on its sickly green carapace, the creature looked little worse for wear. It had barely even slowed down.

"You humans have your toys and your tricks, but you still lack power," the spider's alien mouth twisted into what must have been a sneer. "It seems I have misjudged you yet again."

The spider spat a thick rope of web from his mouth. Steve instinctively tried to block it, but that just meant it was his arm that was ensnared instead of his head. In a single bound the spider leapt up the side of the police station, latching halfway up a spiraling fire escape, and Steve was pulled up with him like a fish on a hook. The spider whipped his head to one side and the rope slammed Steve into the wall hard enough to dent the stone.

As he fell, he lashed out in a panic, clutching upon a piece of ductwork that clung to the building like vines. He was spared only for a second before it snapped, but this let him control his fall just enough to grab the edge of the fire escape and pull himself up. Shaking, gasping for air, and pretty sure that he had wet his new magic armor, he looked down and saw the spider-creature crawling up the side of the building towards him.


	11. Act 1, Part 8

Briggs rubbed her throat, coughing up thick phlegm. It felt like she had just gargled with broken glass and vegemite. This was by far the least of her problems. Police officers lay dead or dying all around her, and the air was filled with the stench of the former and the wailing of the latter. A few feet away, Detective Carter was lying prone on the floor, twitching but alive, but this was the smallest of comforts.

Briggs rose to a sitting position, groggily looking for her radio on the glass-strewn floor, picking it out of a puddle of blood. It squawked into life with a burst of electric static, and she made an almost identical noise when she first tried to speak into it.

"Jimenezzz," she choked out, having to force the worst past her uncooperative throat. "Jimenez!"

"B…briggs?" said the man on the other end of the radio. His voice was slow and indistinct, as though he had just been woken up in the middle of the night. "…what happened?"

"Monster goddamn apocalypse is what happened," Briggs said, her voice degenerating into a coughing fit at the end. "The thing that killed those cops… came here."

"Oh my god…" Jimenez said, his voice suddenly becoming composed, like a camera snapping into focus. "Are you alright? What happened?"

"I've been better, but I'll live," Briggs said. "…I was lucky. What the hell happened to that Tooms kid?"

"I was just going to ask you that," said Jimenez. "He's not here… did you change your mind about leaving him with me?"

"I didn't do jack!" said Briggs. "The idiot just burst into the middle of a massacre and challenged the monster to a fight."

"…did he win?"

"Don't even joke about that," said Briggs. "I saw this thing take on a room full of armed cops and not even get blood on him. May as well have tried to get a tank in a headlock. They ran out into the parking lot, I lost sight of both of them. They could be anywhere right now."

"…I've got eyes on the monster, actually," said Jimenez.

"What?" Briggs pushed herself to her feet, legs wobbling but still able to support her. "Where are you? I mean, where is that thing?"

"He's right outside the window," said Jimenez. "He's climbing up the wall like-"

"Do NOT say it!"

"Well it's obvious," said Jimenez. "Wait a second… he's chasing somebody."

"Is it Tooms?"

"I can't tell, they've gone past me," said Jimenez. "He's wearing some kind of armor."

"…when it rains it pours," said Briggs. "Jimenez, I'm going to need to get up there."

Something on the ground caught her eye. She knelt down and picked up a tiny black lump of metal off the ground. It was a bullet. Her bullet. She'd recognize it anywhere, even in this state. The hollow point had blown out, spreading like the petals of a metal flower. Under normal circumstances, they were designed to expand within the body, turning a neat hole into a spreading umbrella of metal agony inside the soft tissues. Ideally, it would put a person into shock with the minimum of penetration, dropping them with just a few shots and cause minimal collateral damage. This one had hit the monster point-blank and done as much as a raw egg thrown at a concrete wall. She slipped the bullet into her pocket.

"…and I'm going to need firepower."

*          *          *

Steve pulled himself up onto the roof, his arms and legs feeling like rubber. The roof was hard, gray concrete, studded fairly regularly with concrete air vents and air conditioner units, and off on the other side was a section of building that extended up past this roof. He took one step towards it and then collapsed onto hands and knees, but only able to hold himself up for a few seconds. He rolled onto his back, bolts of electric pain shooting along his spinal column. His head lolled over to one side.

The humanoid spider was crouched atop the building's air conditioning unit. It looked as though it had been there for some time. Steve was suddenly very aware of the problems inherent in trying to out-climb a creature with the powers of a spider.

He rolled over onto his hands and knees, trying in vain to get up as the spider slowly stalked towards him, approaching with all the slow inevitability of an iceberg in a major shipping lane. With just inches away, a sudden burst of fear and adrenaline brought him to his feet.

The monster punched him in the face. And then punched him again. And again. And again and again and again and again and again. The blows were muffled by the black helm that protected his face, but Steve was still seeing two or three monsters by the end. The spider took advantage of this and grabbed the shining belt by its brilliant red gem.

"This was never meant for you!" the monster pulled on the buckle, but it refused to detach from Steve's body. "…no."

Steve threw a punch, but the monster caught it as though it was a baseball. His other hand sent Steve flying back into the wall.

"This cannot be lost again," he said, advancing on Steve. His claws extended from his wrists, growing into twin, foot-long blades. "I will not let you claim this power!"

He slashed at Steve, who barely managed to deflect the blow and catch the spider's arm, trying to get it into some kind of joint lock.

"I don't even want this thing!" he shouted, pleading with the monster. "This is a wide-awake nightmare! Take it! You can have the power!"

The monster shrugged off the arm lock like it was a piece of cobweb, tossing Steven onto his back.

"It's not so simple!" The kicked Steve in the stomach, and he flew back into one of the vents. The concrete broke like a piece of stale bread. "You've claimed the power for your own! You've taken what was my right!"

The Spider brought his foot down on the on Steve's sternum, pinning him to the floor.

"You've ruined everything!" the spider was crushing Steve beneath his heel, screaming his frustration to an empty sky. He screamed and shouted, stretching out his final syllable into a wordless cry of rage. The Spider continued like this until Steve kicked him in the butt and rolled him out of the pin.

"…I have had TOO MUCH of this human impudence!" The spider shot a rope of web that coiled around Steve's neck and pulled tight like a noose. Steve could do nothing but pull at the tight cord and gasp for air as the spider pulled and swung the web. He was laughing like an elementary school psychopath torturing a puppy.

Eventually, even this lost its joy, and the spider forced Steve over to the corner of the building, pushing him back with one hand and pulling on his noose with the other. Steve was bent over backwards over the long drop, the noose tightening around his neck as he was pushed further and further back. He could hear his heart pumping in his ears like a machine gun. The spider brought his claws up to Steve's face.

"The power may not leave when you are dead," said the spider, his voice barely obscured by the webbing in his mouth. "I may have to peel it from you."

Steve could only choke in response and try in vain to force his way free, but the spider had every possible advantage, and forced Steve's arms back, almost wrenching them from his shoulders. His heart was getting louder still, pounding in his ears so loud it was almost deafening, and the light was fading from his eyes. He could tell that this was the end. In a moment, it all seemed to slow down.

If he was being honest, he never expected to die by being choke-thrown off a building by a human spider while wearing magical beetle armor given to him by a talking bug ghost. But he supposed nobody can ever know something like that. He was feeling tired now. His body hurt from the fighting. Maybe he could just… go to sleep. Close his eyes, and it would all be no wait, hang on a second.

That wasn't his heart in his ears. That wasn't his eyes failing him. That was a goddamn helicopter flying so high as to blot out the sun.

The spider was surprised by this, at least enough to loosen the pressure on Steve's throat, and they both turned to look as the helicopter turned perpendicular to them, presenting its open side door.

Steve and the spider both immediately recognized Agent Helen Briggs, kneeing in the open helicopter compartment.

Only Steve recognized the high-powered rifle in her hands.

"GET! SQUASHED!" Nobody could hear Briggs over the noise from the helicopter, but it made her feel good. She fired directly at the spider's head, hitting square in the middle of the left temple.

To say that the high-powered rifle bullet did absolutely bleeding nothing to the monster would have been a very grave inaccuracy.

It made him _mad_.


	12. Act 1, Part 9

The spider looked to the air, at this strange whirling contraption that had just attacked him. It bit off the webbing around Steve's neck with a single dismissive motion and shot a second strand into the air. It latched onto the helicopter like a steel claw and the spider pulled himself up hand over hand until he was filling the empty cargo door, casting a shadow on agent Briggs like the moon eclipsing the sun.

Briggs was frightened, anybody would be, and with what she had seen she had more reason to than any. Some part of her had realized that her escape from the creature had been too miraculous to be permanent. She fell backwards in shock as the creature leapt up into the helicopter, dropping her high-powered rifle to the floor. But then, it would have been useless at this close range. In one swift, practiced motion she drew her handgun and unloaded a three-round burst into the creature's chest. It did about as much damage as spitting in the creature's face would have, but she didn't believe in half measures.

The spider lunged at her, swatting her gun away and forcing her arm back, striking out at her face with a jab of his clawed hand. She dodged away, but only barely, the creature's arm moving faster than anyone she had ever sparred with. The tip of one caught her face, just barely missing her eyes but leaving a long, bloody slash across her face. She brought her free hand up, growling at the river of pain running through her skin, the blood dripping down her cheek and into her mouth. She watched through her fingers as the spider readied another strike.

The creature was grappled from behind. The other creature she had seen, the one with the black body and white armor, had jumped up to the helicopter and locked the spider in a grappling hold, pinning his clawed arm back. The spider hissed and elbowed the armed figure in the ribs, forcing him to drop his hold. The armored man fought back.

For a few tense moments they fought, suspended over hundreds of feet of empty air, balancing on the helicopter's landing struts like two dueling tightrope walkers. Briggs held her gun, trying to get a shot on the spider, for all the good it would do, but both of them were moving far too fast for her eyes to track, let alone her hands. They grappled on the floor of the helicopter, the armored figure bending the spider's spine back and bringing both hands to the creature's throat, before the spider was able grasp the masked man's face and reverse the hold.

The spider had seemingly forgotten about Briggs, and slashed at the armored man's chest plate with his foot-long claws, raising a shower of sparks from the white material. The armored man took advantage of his position and kicked the spider in the stomach, both feet striking dead center. The spider fell, but grabbed the armored man's legs, pulling them both down together. They dangled from the landing struts, each one looking for a single advantage over the other. The spider dug and clawed at the armored man, trying to pull his way up his hanging body, the armored figure kicking frantically at the spider, trying to make him drop his grip.

The armored man was strong, but not without limits, and the spider was heavy and his claws were sharp. With the spider climbing up his body he was forced to let one hand drop and strike the monster in the face, but his other hand was already slipping.

Briggs dived forward and grabbed the armored figure's wrist with both hands. She didn't know what impulse had propelled her forward, but she held his arm with a death grip, pulling him back into the helicopter with all her strength. The armored man looked up at her, his bulbous red eyes glinting in the sunlight. As Briggs pulled him up he delivered a vicious kick to the spider's torso, forcing his spine into the landing struts. The spider shrieked and let go, seemingly dropping off into nothingness.

Briggs pulled the armored man up into the compartment before sticking her head out the open door, scanning the ground beneath them.

"Where did he go?" she shouted, her voice lost against the whirl of the blades. The armored figure tilted his head. "He fell, did you see where he landed? We need to recover the body!"

The spider pounced on her from behind, digging his claws into her shoulders. She fought back, bashing the creature's head with the butt of her gun, but that was less than worthless. The armored figure pulled himself up into the compartment and leapt forward, delivering a brutal punch to the spider's face. He dropped Briggs and fell back down, clinging to the underside of the helicopter with fingers and toes, skittering around like an insect on the ceiling. The armored man grabbed Briggs and pulled her to one side, away from the gaping helicopter doors.

"Get off me, get off!" Briggs shouted, pushing the figure away. She rubbed her shoulders. "God, your hands are like steel."

"Sorry," said the armored figure, looking at his black-armored hands. "I'm still getting used to this. You're bleeding."

"I'm aware," Briggs said, wiping her bloody face on her sleeve. "Damn thing probably has all kinds of ancient spider infections on it."

"I told you to stay away from him!" said the armored man. "There's nothing you can do against something like that!"

"And I told you, Tooms," Briggs said, pointing back at him. "This is my job to _find_ something to do, otherwise more innocent people like you are…"

She blinked. She had said it on instinct, and it took her several seconds to realize just what she had said, but then… The immobile, implacable, insectile face of the armed man somehow managed to look embarrassed.

" _TOOMS?_ " she shouted.

"Um…" said what she now was certain was Steven Tooms, nervously rubbing the back of his head. "…I'm actually even more confused than you."

The spider came up from the other side and pounced on Steve, wrapping his hands around his throat. Arms flailing, Steve was dragged to the open door as the monster tried to pull him out, tossing him to the ground. Briggs could only watch as he struggled with the beast, delivering a pair of lightning-fast elbows to the gut that made the spider loose his grasp, followed by a brutal kick to the shoulder that sent the monster flying backwards, away from the helicopter and into the ground. He plummeted to earth, landing on a warehouse hard enough to put a man-sized hole in the roof. Steven stared at the damage, his chest heaving with exertion, until the helicopter flew out of eyeshot.

"Tooms," Briggs said, pulling Steven back in. "…what happened? How the hell did you become… this?"

"I… really wish I could tell you," he said, slumping on the floor. "All I know is I got a magical belt from a dead man and then a talking beetle appeared in my head telling me I had to fight a giant spider."

"…what."

"I know!"

"How badly did your head get knocked around in that thing?" she said, reaching out to touch his helmet. "What is this made of? It doesn't feel like metal…"

"I... I don't know," Steve said, staring at his hands. "I don't know how it happened, I just… I needed it to be there."

There was a long pause, with no noise but the roar of the helicopter blades.

"…how do I make it go away?"

Briggs shrugged.

"We can help you," she said, awkwardly patting him on the shoulder. Comforting victims wasn't her greatest skill, and comforting magical insect superheroes was just a bit out of her experience. "We'll get you the best doctors; find out what this thing did to you. We’ll get you back to normal."

"…oh no," Steve said, pushing her off and shakily getting to his feet. "I watch the X-Files! I know what you're going to do to me!"

"The X-Files," Briggs buried her face in her hand. "God damn this keeps happening. Steven-"

"No!" he said, standing in the open door. "I'm not letting you spooks dissect me! I'm getting my own help!"

"Wait!"

She shouted, but Steve was already gone, jumping to a nearby rooftop. He landed square on his face, but still was able to get back to his feet, brushing himself off and limping away across the rooftops. Briggs crossed her arms and sighed.

"Just one simple serial killer," she said. "That's all I wanted."


	13. Act 1, Part 10

Helicopters criss-crossed the night sky, beams of brilliant white light cutting through the darkness. A field of brightness played over the empty streets and alleys like the gaze of a predator, up and down the sides of buildings and through the dirt and scrub of vacant lots. But their gaze saw nothing, their search was unfulfilled. Whatever they were looking for was not making itself known.

Jimenez leaned against his rented car and sighed into his coffee, the thick odor of it making him recoil. Jimenez had very few regrets about joining the bureau, but chief among them would be the coffee. He had never been a fan, never could stand the taste, not even diluted with enough cream to desiccate a cow. Briggs told him that he'd get used to it, but if he hadn't developed a taste for it studying forensic science for seven hours a night then he probably never would. If this search went for any longer his needs for caffeine would go beyond the limits of any conventional beverage.

His radio squawked. He tossed the dregs of his coffee to the ground, crumpled up the paper cup and answered.

"Jimenez."

"Status report, Agent," said the familiar voice, her words ever so slightly stretched out and distorted.

"Briggs, you're supposed to be in the hospital," said Jimenez, whispering into the radio, not wanting any of the other officers milling around the dark, empty cityscape. "Are you drunk?"

"Of course I'm in the hospital!" shouted Briggs. "I escaped that thing twice, I'm not going to let it take me out with an infection."

"Right, right," said Jimenez. "How's your face?"

"I can live with it," said Briggs, her voice dropping back to normal. "They gave me about 40 stitches and put me on some serious painkillers. My whole face feels like it's stuffed with marshmallows."

"Well better get your ass well soon, or I'm going to wrap this thing while you're still in bed."

"You still haven't given me that status report, Jimenez," the voice on the other end seemed amused. Jimenez sighed. He was never able to get anything past her.

"The… spider landed in an abandoned warehouse, in a whole district full of abandoned warehouses," Jimenez said. "All kinds of dark places for him to hide, nobody around to see him move. We've got uniforms canvassing the area but it took us an hour just to mobilize around where he landed and the bastard was long gone by then. He could be anywhere in the city."

"Not like it can be easy for us," said Briggs. "How about Tooms, any sign of Tooms? Or that armor guy?"

"Not a hair," Jimenez said, pulling out a notebook. "We had the police set up a tip line, though. There were about a dozen false leads on Tooms and fifteen on the armor guy, plus ten Batmans… ten Batmen? Ten Batmans, seven Spider-Mans, three Robocops, a Ronald McDonald with a chainsaw and five whole teams of Power Rangers."

"God, that's the last thing we need," Briggs said. "As if we don't have enough trouble with the normal sized monster."

"Who was that masked guy?" Jimenez asked. "Did he say anything to you?"

"…I couldn't say," Briggs said. "It was really loud in that helicopter. Could barely hear my own gun going off."

"Right, stupid question," said Jimenez.

"Yes, yes it was," said Briggs.

Something caught Jimenez's eye. A tiny spot of blackness was moving against the tableau of gray and shadows that was the city at night.

"Hold on," he said, focusing on the shape. A single inattentive moment and it could be lost. "We have a situation."

He turned to approach the black shape, slowly, taking advantage of the night, careful enough not to spook it. He got closer and his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and the figure resolved to what looked to be a man in a long, black coat, a dark baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. It didn't seem to notice Jimenez. In fact, the agent would likely have written the man off as just an ordinary man going about his nightly business if he wasn't the single most suspicious person he had ever seen.

"Excuse me, sir!" Jimenez called out. The figure didn't seem to hear him. "Sir, this area has been closed for a federal investigation. If you don't vacate this area immediately I'll be forced to detain-"

The figure made a sharp right turn into an alleyway, his footsteps breaking into a run as soon as he was out of Jimenez' line of sight. Jimenez broke into a run, drawing his radio.

"All units, this is Special Agent Jimenez, in pursuit of fleeing person of interest!" he said, following the retreating figure into the alleyway, keen instincts tracking the sounds of the strange man's pounding feet and long, flapping coat. "Subject dressed in black coat with black hat, currently on foot in alley south of Nielsen Street!"

He turned a corner and skidded to a halt. The corner led into a blind alley, bordered on all three sides by brick walls. The alley was shrouded in shadow, but he could see the darker shape of the black trenchcoat. Cautiously, he drew his pistol with one hand and flashlight in the other and approached the man.

"Nowhere to run, sir!" he called out, trailing the light over the dark figure. His shoes and pants were as black as his cloak, and as the flashlight beam came close to the man's face he shielded his eyes with a pair of black leather gloves. "Alright put your hands down. I'm FBI, you're nowhere near my pay grade." He took a step forward, slowly, his tone friendly but his arms up. "You're not under arrest… we just need to ask you a few questions, then you're on your way."

The black-clad man seemed to scoff.

"Questions?" he said, his face still hidden behind his eyes. "Just questions? Is that all?"

"…sir?" Jimenez took a step back. He was still pretty green, especially compared to his partner, but he knew when there was no possible good outcome. "I need to ask you to lie on the ground, sir."

"It's fascinating," the stranger said, bringing his hands down, but shielding his face between his upturned collar and the brim of his cap. "I come into your restricted zone, I ignore your verbal directives and I flee at the slightest provocation. I'm obviously a threat to you, or at least an enemy of some kind, and you have a weapon. But you seem to take any step you can to avoid a violent outcome."

"There are a limited number of steps I can take, sir," said Jimenez, his gun trained on the man. The way he spoke was so nonchalant, so aloof it was hard to even respond to him. It was like trying to threaten a parade balloon. "Keep refusing to comply and you'll get your violent response."

"So you say," said the man. "No, I've seen your mettle. It's completely up to me."

And then the man was no longer a man. The first glimpse Jimenez saw of his face was a grin, one that seemed to stretch impossibly wide, lips peeling back from his jaws like they were being stretched. Pointed, scalloped ears grew from each side of the man's head, pointing to the night sky like the horns of a devil. The growth of these ears pulled and tugged on the skin of his face, stretching it until his eyes were but tiny slits that let no light through above a fanged, distended grin. His clothes seemed to melt away, staining his skin a flat, matte black, on a body covered in toned, humanoid musculature and patches of coarse, black hair, naked but for a loincloth and a pair of nipple rings. The wrist and elbow of each arm had a bony protrusion, each one several feet long, and stretched between them were lengths of pale, leathery skin, lined with thick veins. It held its winged arms out wide and grinned at Jimenez, a high-pitched call emanating just at the edge of hearing.

"Wha…" Jimenez asked, taking a step back and finding only wall behind him, his flashlight beam making shaky circles in the air. "Wha… wa… _qué…qué chingados_?"

The beam shook away from the creature, and that was all he needed to close the gap between the two, pinning the agent against the wall with one jet-black hand. He leaned in, whispering to the trapped man.

" _Su vejo dios…_ " it said, the Spanish coming just as naturally to it as did English. _"…he vuelto_."

It leaned in, fanged mouth opening wide enough to bite through Jimenez's throat, and it seemed intent on doing just that. Jimenez closed his eyes and tried to look away, inadvertently giving the creature a much greater target.

"FREEZE!" Half a dozen cops rounded the corner just then, each of them turning their flashlights on the grisly scene before them. The creature screamed, dropping Jimenez to the ground, bringing both leathery wings up to shield his face.

"Jesus Christ!" said one of the officers, his voice echoed by a dozen similar cries. "What the hell is that thing?" asked another. "It's a goddamn vampire!" said a third.

"…s-shoot it!" said Jimenez, his own hands shaking too badly to aim. "Shoot it! It's one of them!"

The officers collectively snapped out of their daze and brought their guns to bear, but they had hesitated just too long. The creature shrieked so loud that the threatening officers were paralyzed, rooted in place with hands clamped tight over ears, firearms completely forgotten. The monster spread its wings and jumped, taking to the air with no more effort than a bird leaping from a tree. Jimenez watched it soar off and vanish into the night sky. He pulled out his radio.

"Briggs?" he said. "Briggs, the situation has escalated."

"Of course it has," said Briggs. "What's the status."

"They can look like us," said Jimenez. "One of them found me. Looked like a normal person at first, then it… it turned into one of those things."

"Crap on a stick!" said Briggs. "That must be how it got away from us. We weren't looking for anything but a spider. Was it the same one that I fought?"

"No ma'am," said Jimenez. "It was completely different."

"So now there's two goddamn bulletproof psycho spiders running around this city," Briggs's voice was sounding tired.

"Oh no… it's _completely_ different," said Jimenez. "Not even a spider at all."

"These things come in different species too," said Briggs. "What was this one?"

Jimenez paused.

"Um… okay, you know how the first one was a human spider, but you didn't want us to call it… you know, _that_?" Jimenez said. "Even though it's the obvious thing to call it?"

"This case will have some dignity to it, Jimenez," said Briggs. "I'll turn in my badge before I say that dozens of cops were murdered by a goddamn comic book character."

"Right, well… the other animal…" Jimenez paused again, holding the radio away from his face as though it was on fire. "Look, you're not going to like it."

There was a longer pause, this time from the other side of the radio. Then, finally, Briggs's voice returned.

"…is it a bat?" she said.

Jimenez was silent. Uniformed officers looked back and forth at each other. Finally, there was a long sigh from the radio.

"They've gone and made this personal, Jimenez."


	14. Act 1, Part 11

Dr. Johnathan Christopher lay on a bunk in the on-call room, staring at the ceiling, completely failing to get to sleep. Today had been a nightmare, and he was only on the fringes of it. He had heard of the attack on the police station on the news and from EMTs, it was all anyone in the hospital could talk about. They had said it must have been at least a 50-foot tall manarantula that breathed acidic fire and had chainsaws instead of hands that could block bullets with its eyeballs and crush cars beneath its feet. He assumed they were exaggerating, but exaggerating from _what_?

There were no less than three major hospitals around the police station, and they had needed every open bed they had. Dr. Christopher, still just an intern, had spent the day going from bed to bed, fetching packs of blood and antibiotics, suturing ragged wounds and stemming bleeding and generally staying out of the way of people who knew what they were doing. It had taken seven hours, but they were finally able to stabilize the officers. …most of them. Those that weren't DOA were suffering acute cell necrosis at the point of incision, wounds that bled and bled and spread like an oil fire. Their toxicologist said it looked like a cross between a brown recluse spider and an angry bear.

Just as his eyelids were finally beginning to weigh on him, he was jolted back awake by a shrill electronic tone. Some other horrible thing was happening to somebody. Just half an hour and his shift would have ended. He brushed a few strands of curly dark hair from his eyes as he pulled his beeper from his belt. The room was dark, and he had to climb down off the top bunk and stumble into the hallway before he could make sense of the display.

He squinted. Even then it still didn't make sense. Another doctor brushed past him on her way to the on-call room and he grabbed her arm.

"Izzy, you ever see this?" he said, showing her the pager. "I haven't seen a code like this before."

Dr. Isabelle Thompson stared at the screen. It wasn't a traditional hospital code or even a phone number, just three digits and a letter. 125 S.

"New to me..." said Izzy, handing it back to him. "Maybe it's a test. They're always sending me on these bullcrap errands. Last week Dr. Lawrence called me in to consult on a case of butterflies in the stomach presenting with indications of spare ribs."

"That's actually pretty clever," John said. "My first week here Dr. Williams hid in a body bag with full zombie makeup on."

"Really?"

"I mean this is supposed to be a place of healing," John said. "I nearly had a heart attack. …really good makeup work, though. Took three hours to put on. Apparently he knows a visual effects guy."

"To think he could have spent that time practicing medicine," Izzy sighed. "I dunno, maybe they want you in 125 South? That would be my guess."

"Little obvious," John said. "Well, maybe I can run out the clock. Your shift ends the same as mine, right?"

Izzy grinned, playfully slapping him on the chest.

"Not tonight, Johnny," she said. "I've been on call for the longest 36 hours of my life. I need at least 18 hours of sleep."

John checked his watch.

"So I can schedule you for…" Izzy slapped him harder. "Okay, okay. I'm about to pass out myself. You go get some sleep, I'll go… be humiliated by experienced medical practitioners."

Izzy yawned, and gave him a wave over her shoulder as she disappeared into the bunkroom. John trudged off down the corridor.

*          *          *

Room 126 South was empty when John found it. The lights were out, shrouding the room in darkness. The bed was empty, and looked as though it hadn't been slept in for some time. The window was open, letting a chill Pacific Northwest wind into the room.

"Hello?" John cautiously stepped into the dark chamber. "I was paged here, does anyone need me?"

He tried the light switch, flicking it on and off several times in quick succession, getting no result.

"Alright guys, nice and spooky," he said, trying it eight more times just to see if it would work. "The zombie thing is kind of played out, you know. It's not going to work twice."

The door slammed shut behind him and he whirled about at the loud noise. He tried the handle but it outright refused to move. He felt a presence behind him, the hair on his neck standing rigid. He made to whirl about and face the stranger but a cold, clammy hand clamped down on his mouth, an arm locking around his neck with the strength of a steel bar. John tried to break free but the strong grip all but rooted him in place. He brought his elbows back down into his attacker's midsection but they hit something as hard and unforgiving as solid steel.

The stranger dragged John away from the door and the window, the young doctor kicking and struggling to no avail. The hand on his mouth was strong, and held so tightly it threatened to crush his teeth. He brought a heel up and back on the attacker's kneecap with as much effect as if he had tried to kick the building down. The thing's head leaned in, a cold presence on the side of his neck…

"Dude, I need you to promise not to freak the hell out," whispered a very familiar voice. "You're going to see why in a second! Totally understand if you can't keep the promise."

John's eyes widened.

"Mmmmph?"

"Oh crap, sorry," said the stranger, taking his hand away.

"Steve?" said John.

"Yeah…" said Steve, his voice dropping. "It's me, but… look, man, something's happened and I need a doctor, but this is some serious trouble. Like… lead bunker five hundred feet below Area 51 serious. What I'm going to show you, you can't tell anyone."

"This isn't helping me not freak out," said John, feeling much more calm knowing that it was a close personal friend who had assaulted him in a dark empty room.

"Well, I wanted to be honest," said Steve.

"Look, Steve, this is me here," said John. "Your boy. Johnny C. Doctor Golden Touch."

"They don't call you Doctor Golden Touch."

"You just wait," John said. "Point is I've always had your back, so just shut up and show me the weird thing,"

"Alright…" said Steve, letting his friend go. "But remember, you asked for this!"

John turned around and took a step back, letting Steve step forward into a beam of light from the hallway. He saw Steve's new form, his black shell, his white armor, his bulbous red eyes glinting in fluorescent light. He buried his face in his hands.

"Steve… you brought me here for a goddamn _costume_?"

"Costume?" Steve shouted, and then dropped his voice back to a whisper. "Dude, I'm stuck like this!"

"Well turn around and let me see the zipper," said John, trying to turn Steve around. "This is really good stuff. Do you and Dr. Williams have the same guy?"

"Dammit, this is not a costume!" Steve shouted, angrily bringing his fist down on the bed. The metal frame dented, bending nearly in half. John jumped back, cursing under his breath. "Could I have done that if this was a costume?"

"…holy crap," said John, covering his mouth in shock. "What the hell happened?"

"I… I'm still trying to figure it out," said Steve. "There was a belt and a mummy and a whole bunch of monsters… everyone at the dig is dead, John. They got Hector. I saw them kill him."

"No way," John said, his face going pale. "I heard about the monsters but… how? What happened?"

"…I can't talk about it, John," said Steve, shaking his head. "Not now. One of them came after me. It killed people. Then a… a magic bug started talking to me. It turned me into a monster to fight it." Steve's head tilted to one side as though he was remembering a long-forgotten song. "I don't care what I'm supposed to be!"

"Eh?"

"Sorry, it was the magic beetle in my head," said Steve.

"Ah-huh…" John nodded. "So you're like… magic now? Did you do the door thing?"

"Yeah… I can sometimes move things, but it's really tiring," Steve said. "The bug said I'll get more Jedi powers as I 'undergo metamorphosis,' whatever that is." He paused again. "I'll explain what a Jedi is later."

"And the lights?"

"That wasn't me," said Steve. "Probably a circuit breaker."

"Right," said John. "First thing's first, we need to get a look inside of you."

"…eww."

*          *          *

Night hours meant reduced shifts for the hospital, so it was comparatively easy to get John out of the room, down into the lab and into a full-body CT scan. All it took was a body bag, a copy of hustler, some cherry bombs, three doses of medical-grade laxative and a rare holofoil pokemon card. The scheme they concocted was unconventional, perhaps to the point where it could be described as _'zany_ ,' to use the Latin, and anyone who witnessed it would have surely called it hilarious.

A CT scan is a rather efficient form of diagnosis, as even a scan of an entire human body takes just a matter of minutes, and the results are available in a similar time. The difficulty comes more from interpreting the results into some actionable facts. In this case, however, they were rather conclusive from the get-go.

"Okay John," said Steve. "If I understand correctly, this thing is like a giant fancy X-Ray on steroids?"

"That's pretty much exactly what it-"

" _Then where the hell are all my bones_?"

John didn't have an answer. The material encasing Steve's body was tough to penetrate, but not impossible, but inside his body there were tissues, muscles, organs, all of the things needed for life, but no bones.

"Your bones are the least of your problem, Steve," John said, his hands shaking. Some idiot had decided that you couldn't smoke in a hospital for some unimportant reason. "You can live without bones. But the rest of you… your heart is just a big blood-tube where your spine should be. Most of your digestive system is just a… a giant funnel pointing out your ass, although that may be academic since you don't seem to have a mouth. Hell, I don't think you even have _lungs_ anymore! This physiology… you shouldn't be able to _stand_ let along bend steel with your fists!"

"What… what the hell does that mean?" said Steve, his black-clad fingers clenched so hard they left furrows in the counter. "I'm not human?"

"Human?" said John, his dark brown eyes so wide they were almost solid black. "Steve, you're not even a vertebrate! What you are… biologically, you're an insect."


	15. Act 1, Part 12

They snuck Steve out through the parking garage, wrapping him in blankets and shoving him in the back seat of John's car. They drove through the night in silence, John's knuckles white on the steering wheel, his eyes wide at the passing streetlamps and stoplights. Normally he would have been constantly sucking down espresso and red bull just to keep his eyes on the road, but the past hour had been a bigger jolt than 20 ccs of epinephrine. It was all he could do to keep under the speed limit.

So much was running through his mind at one time. What could have done that to his friend in so short a time? No gene therapy in the world could do that, it would be like completely rebuilding a human from the DNA on up. Couldn't be any kind of mutation or toxic exposure, or Steve would just be a walking mass of tumors, not a construction of ordered but alien tissues. It was getting to the point that the most likely explanation was that some mad scientist living in the mountains had strapped him to a lab table, cut out Steve's brain and sewn it into the body of a creature he had composed out of discarded organs and insect paste and then brought the whole thing to life with a lightning bolt.

He shook off those thoughts and stared at the road ahead. His apartment was just a few blocks away. They could hide out there until they figured out… well, any damn thing about what was going on. They couldn't keep him at the hospital. Neither one of them doubted that that spider thing might still be out there, and any one of his colleagues would see a mutant insect-man in their wards as first step to the Nobel Prize. Even John was drafting a research proposal in his head. Steve would never go for that, though. If John so much as brought it up he'd be halfway to Vancouver. The way he was now, John didn't give good odds that anyone would be able to stop him.

John's apartment was on the fifth floor. John took the elevator, Steve took the fire escape. He climbed in to the darkened room, his shoulder bumping the window frame. A jagged crack appeared in the glass and Steve winced. …or he would have if he could move any part of his face.

"S-sorry," he said, sheepishly climbing the rest of the way in. "Not really sure what this body can do."

"Don't worry about it," said John, shutting the window as gingerly as possible. "The security deposit's nothing next to my student loans."

Steve had to laugh at that, looking around the room. John's apartment was fairly small, with one room serving as combined living room, dining room, office and library, with a tiny kitchen off to one side, a tiny bathroom off to the other and a bedroom shoved wherever it would fit. But every spare bit of wall was covered in bookshelves, the furniture, TV and computer were all just a couple years away from new, and there was enough space to hold a modest size party or game of dungeons and dragons, even if some people would need to sit on the floor.

Steve had been here several times before, but it looked different with his new eyes. The familiar shapes were blurry now, turning the pattern of the sofa into an indistinct brown slurry. The walls and floors were rounded, bulging out like a balloon inflated nearly to the point of bursting. He could see further than he ever had before. Standing and staring at the front door he could fully see the walls on either side of him, the floor and the ceiling, all crammed into a mental field of view that could barely take in so much even at the periphery. It gave the effect of being nearsighted, drunk and under the effect of powerful hallucinogenic mushrooms all at the same time. He tried to rub his forehead, then found he was rubbing his eye, then a pointy crest growing out of his forehead, then he just gave up.

"Alright, so…" he said, sitting down on the couch. "…what do we do now?"

"Well, in my official capacity as a medical professional, I prescribe that you get some goddamn sleep," he said, tossing a blanket at Steve's chest. He caught it without appearing to notice, and seemed surprised he had done so.

"That's it?"

"Trust me, 90 percent of medicine is just making sure people get some sleep," said John, gathering the pillows at one end of the couch. "Also I have no earthly idea what else to do or how to do it, so for now, you sleep."

Steve snorted at him… but had to agree he had a point. Even with all the energy he had had before, his arms and legs were feeling like bars of lead right now. He nodded at John, and lowered his head to the cushions, stretching the blanket all over him.

"Hey, Steve?" John asked. "Do you have one of those sleep masks they give you on airplanes? I don't think I have eyelids anymore."

Luckily, John did indeed have a sleep mask. Unluckily, it only covered about 25 percent of his eyes. So they wrapped a bath towel around his head and called it good. John patted Steve on the shoulder and went off into his own bedroom, as Steve lay face-up on the couch, his head wrapped in chitin and terrycloth, trying desperately not to think of anything that had happened in the last few days. He did not succeed.

"Hey… um… talking magical beetle guy?"

**_I am here._ **

"Gah!" Steve shouted, turning away from the horse-sized beetle hovering three feet above his head. "Oh god, I forgot about that… how can I see you with the towel on?"

**_We are connected at a level beyond-_ **

"I don't actually care right now," he said, covering his face with his arm. "You're like… way too big for a bug. Can't you be a bug-sized bug?"

**_This is the lower limit of my form._ **

"Wonderful," he said. "You… you were in my pocket when I changed." He patted his chest. "Is this… is this you?"

**_A drawing of a tree is not a tree, but it conveys the image and the nature of the tree. So it was with the beetle._ **

"But… did you do this to me?"

**_You did this to you. Your body learned its new form._ **

"Not helpful… of course," Steve sighed. "Look, if you're my spirit animal… what does that mean? Do I need to pray to you, or meditate, or smoke peyote or anything? How do I get a straight answer out of you?"

**_I am not a god, Steven Tooms. I am many things as I am needed to be, but I am not a god._ **

"What kinds of things are you, and can any of them turn me back to the way I was?"

**_You will never be the way you were. But whatever you are, you will be yourself._ **

"God damn you, talking ghost beetle!" Steve shouted, swatting blindly at something that wasn't there. "Can you not just tell me something without wrapping it up in nonsense like a freaking Christmas enigma? 'Hey Steve, you're going to turn into a mutant bug man and fight monsters that can tear through normal people like piñatas full of blood!' That would… well, that wouldn't have been _better_ , but at least I would know what was coming! More than five minutes of warning would have been nice too."

The beetle moved its head back and forth, giant pincers slowly opening and closing. Its head slowly drooped low.

**_I… apologize, Steven Tooms. I am not one accustomed to verbal communication. I am attempting to speak of things as natural to me as the use of your legs. Were I taking your form, I would no doubt be as a small child in a grown body, competent at little more than crawling and screaming and defecating upon my own person._ **

"So… I'm doing pretty good for an infant beetle?"

**_You are but a grub, struggling to survive, but in one day you have achieved your first metamorphosis. I regret that it was painful. This will fade, in time._ **

"You kept saying that before," Steve said. "No fear, no pain."

**_That is the way of the beetle. Unburdened._ **

"So… what, beetles don't feel pain?"

**_Not in the way you would comprehend it. A beetle eats its fill, but is not greedy. It fights for survival, but has no anger for its predators. When its body is ready to change, it accepts the transformation that is to come. When it faces its own death, it does so without fear. When it dies, it suffers no pain. The mind of the beetle is clear. You must achieve that clarity. You must become the beetle to survive._ **

"This is… this is too late at night for a spiritual awakening," Steve said, yawning. "Can we discuss this in the morning?"

The beetle nodded its giant beetle head, and Steven rolled onto his side.

**_Rest well, Steven Tooms. Your first test is still ongoing._ **


	16. Act 1, Part 13

All that could be seen, from horizon to horizon, was fire. The horn-shell stood atop the hill and stared at the flame with flat, black eyes, the fire shining in its smooth, black skin. In the clearing below, the great wooden houses of the _tsinuk_ people were burning from end to end, a whole village being reduced to ash. Men and women ran back and forth in a blind panic, cut off from the shelter of their home and the safety of the woods by that all-consuming flame.

In the distance, looming over the destruction like the face of the great spirt was the mountain. The stone face had been carved out with intricate detail, turning the rough-hewn stone of the earth into thick, blocky protrusions with smooth sides and sharp edges. This was the home of the _boq_ , the beast-ones, the skin-walkers. They had fed upon the people for too long, and now they had grown too numerous and too belligerent to remain. They would burn the race of men to ash.

The horn-shell would not let this stand. His eyes fixed on the flames below, he rushed down the hill, his strides carrying him like a stag in full gallop. His feet craved out great craters in the hill with every step, kicking up vast showers of earth and rock with every stride. He reached the bottom of the hill at full run and kept going.

He rushed through the flaming woods at impossible speed, his passage bringing the wind with him. Powerful gusts cracked like thunder in his wake, flattening saplings and snuffing the raging forest fire as if it had been a single flaming twig. Men, women and children were thrown to the ground by his passing as if crushed by the foot of some invisible giant, his mighty steps flattening whole houses and snuffing fire beneath his feet. But the horn-shell was not slowing down.

He leapt into the air like a bird taking to the wing, soaring high into the air as the mountain unfurled before him. A dark creature spiraled out of the sky and caught him in its grasp, and the horn-shell swung up and alighted upon its back. With his mount, his kin, his spirit-brother, the horn-shell rose higher and higher into the night sky, until even the mountains were beneath him. He stared down, a cold hatred beneath his emotionless face.

So many had fallen beneath him already. Underlings, meaningless thralls and servants. The rulers still remained, the power behind the _boq_. They hid in their mountain citadel; they feared the wrath of those they once consumed. They would no longer be permitted to live. So many still had to die. Leather-wing. Armor-horn. Petal-thorn. Trap-claw. Black-feather. Strong-horn. White-shell. They had retreated into their fortress of stone, cowering beneath the arms of the mountain.

None would survive this night.

The horn-shell dove off the back of his mount, falling towards the mountain like a star from the heavens. He twisted and flipped through the air, his foot pointed down at the air like the tip of a spear. He plummeted to earth, a glowing, red-hot aura burning to life around him. He struck the mountainside feet-first, and it was as a mighty wave crashing down on a forest of twigs. The mighty stone carvings crumbled into dust.

Even this would not stop his foes, however. They were buried deep inside. The horn-shell would have to delve deeper inside their deepest cave and see to it that none of his foes ever saw the light of day.

As Steven Tooms awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself no longer transformed into a giant insect.

*          *          *

"Yes, that's healing nicely," the doctor said, peeling back a layer of bandages. "Swelling's gone down and the sutures look to be holding. You were lucky to get to us in time. If we hadn't been able to halt the spread of the toxin you might have lost both eyes, to say nothing of the damage to your face."

Agent Briggs mumbled something that sounded like it might have been an offering of thanks. Her actual doctor was a nice enough young woman. Briggs hadn't been able to remember her name, due to being literally off her face on anesthetic when they first met, but she was an easy enough person to interact with. But she had spent the night lying in bed with her face wrapped in gauze and a plastic tube in her arm as murderous animal men had free range of the night. She had slept maybe an hour spread out over the whole night.

Oh, it was necessary. She knew that. Absolutely necessary, just like all kinds of things in the world. Sometimes it's necessary to have a tooth pulled. Sometimes it's necessary to eat a salad when you'd rather have fries. Sometimes it's necessary to kill a man.

The doctor handed Briggs a mirror. Her eyes trailed down the line of black stitches running across her dark skin. It ran across her face like a dry riverbed, traveling from just above her left eyelid and crossing her face diagonally, slicing over the bridge of her nose and below her right cheekbone, ending just above the corner of her mouth. She reached up, gingerly touching the scar, expecting a jolt of pain, but felt nothing, not even her own fingertips. She frowned with the left side of her mouth.

"There has been some nerve damage," the doctor said. "The anesthetic is likely exacerbating the numbness. But those should both fade with time."

Briggs' eyes flicked to Jimenez, standing silently in one corner of the room.

"What about the scar?" Briggs asked. To her credit, the doctor's face never cracked.

"Unfortunately, that won't go away on its own," she said, taking back the mirror. "But there are treatments for that. I've scheduled a consultation with a dermatologist and we can start you on a course of-"

"Later," said Briggs. "How long until I get out of here?"

The doctor furrowed her brow.

"Agent Briggs, if we don't treat this properly it will lead to permanent skin damage," she said. "Not could. Will."

"One more scar isn’t going to kill me, doctor," she said, leaning forward, staring into her physician's eyes. "How much longer do I need to stay here?"

The doctor looked away, making a show of flipping through Briggs' chart.

"This is a very delicate situation," she said. "You're still at risk for infection, and your sutures still need inpatient care. The fastest discharge I could do is 24 hours."

Briggs frowned again. The right side still refused to play along.

"Thank you for your help, Dr. Thompson," said Jimenez, nodding slightly. "My partner and I need to discuss our ongoing investigation, I'm afraid I have to ask you to leave."

"Oooh, 'ongoing investigations,'" Dr. Thompson said, winking at the agent. "For a second I almost forgot you two were spies."

Jimenez blushed slightly, and kept it until the doctor had left. Briggs let out a laugh as soon as they were alone.

"Attracting a little attention from the locals?"

"I don't like when they call us spies," he said, the young agent trying and failing to look stern.

"Let them say what they want," Briggs replied, fingering her stitches. "Hard enough to do our job without trying to do PR."

"…that thing does make you look pretty badass," Jimenez said, a nervous flutter in his voice. Briggs stared at him impassively. "It's… you know… upsides?"

"I can live with it," Briggs said, and turned to get out of bed. It was just one more link in a great chain of misery, and this one fairly minor at that. A scar was a fair price for survival. She closed the dressing screen behind her and shrugged out of her robe. "Anything last night?"

"Nothing concrete," said Jimenez, turning away from the curtain for the sake of professionalism. "No homicides reported, no unexplained deaths, no bodies… some windows got smashed in on Market street and there was a three-car pile-up on Route 99, but that wouldn't even make the morning news."

"Not quite their style," said Briggs, slipping into the fresh clothes that Jimenez had brought over. "One of these things massacred a whole department's worth of cops to say hello, I get the feeling we'd know if it was one of them. Still, tell the CSI to look out for any unusual samples. Weird blood, animal fur, handprints in solid steel, anything that just doesn't add up."

"Speaking of, we did get some samples off the roof," said Jimenez, flipping through documents in a manila folder. "No blood or fluids, but plenty of skin samples. At least the lab boys think they're skin. They're having some difficulty analyzing it."

"What about that… other one?" Briggs said, doing up the buttons on her dress shirt, idly gazing through the venetian blinds on the window. "The black-and-white one who fought the spider?"

"It's been quiet once the crank calls ran out of ideas," said Jimenez. "If we find that one… what do we do?"

"You mean cuff him or pin a badge on him?" she said, grinning with half her mouth. "Let's just wait until we find him before…"

Briggs trailed off. There are ways to disguise a person's face, voice, even their body type that can fool even a sophisticated observer into letting them slip past. Body language was much harder to disguise, as it required changing dozens of tiny, interrelated actions that an individual might not even be aware of. Imagine poker players attempting to rid themselves of a fatal tell. A person's walk in particular was so distinctive that they said that no two people had exactly the same way of walking, something that they called a 'gait signature.' Briggs had been trained to recognize these gait signatures, to notice them where others passed them over.

A familiar walk had just entered her field of view. Three stories down, walking across the parking lot, so small she might never have noticed if it hadn't bene for her training. And once she noticed, everything else fell into place. The same height. The same weight. The same shaggy blonde hair.

She had spotted Steven Tooms.


	17. Act 1, Part 14

Briggs shouldered her way through ER doors, badge in hand, and all conversation came to a halt. Her feet were bare, she hadn't bothered to find her shoes, and her bare soles slapped against the tile floors. Her shirt was untucked, and only halfway buttoned, and the holster that would normally be hidden under her jacket was on display for anyone to see. Her long, dark hair hung loosely about her head and shaded her eyes, framing the black scar that crossed her face. Her cold eyes scanned the room, practices senses looking for any signs of her quarry.

"I'm looking for a… a person of interest to an investigation!" she said, her voice projecting into the room with an innate sense of authority. "Caucasian, blonde hair, wearing a tan jacket. He came in here just a few minutes ago, accompanied by doctor of Latino descent. Did anyone see either of these individuals?"

A murmur washed over the room as patients whispered to each other in hushed voices. Briggs stared at them with narrowed eyes.

"Um…" Briggs turned to see the receptionist speaking up, a slight woman with brown hair cut short. "There was a man like that who came in with Dr. Christopher," she said. "But he's not Latino, so…"

"Of course he's Latino!" said an orderly. "I'm pretty sure he's from Brazil."

"Brazil isn't Latino!" the receptionist responded. "They speak Portuguese, not Spanish!"

"That still counts!" said an older doctor. "But it's missing the point. I'm really sure he's… Polynesian? I want to say Polynesian."

Briggs buried her face in her palm.

"None of this matters!" she shouted. "Just tell me where they went!"

"He… he said something about radiology," said the receptionist, pointing down a hallway. "That's in the basement, in the east wing."

"Got it!" said Briggs, as Jimenez approached from behind, her jacket in one hand and her shoes in the other. "Let's roll, Jimenez!"

She ran down where the receptionist had indicated. Jimenez held Brigg's clothes out to the empty air and sighed, following after her.

*          *          *

"I don't think they've ever changed the food in that machine, dude," said John, watching Steve shovel pre-packaged sandwiches into his mouth. "And this is the radiology department, some of that might have cancer."

"Do you have any more quarters?" Steve asked, throwing the empty wrapper onto the expanding pile surrounding his feet. "I haven't had a BLT in a while."

"You had seven eggs and half a pack of bacon for breakfast!" John said. "How are you still hungry?"

"I was starving in a cave for two days!" Steve said, digging in his pockets. "Wait, hang on…" he tilted his head to one side. "The talking magic beetle says I need to eat to fuel my metamorphosis, or something like that."

"You can't blame the magic beetle forever."

The elevator behind them dinged open. Steve turned, his mouth full of sandwich, to see a familiar face with an unfamiliar scar staring at him through the open doors. The woman, the agent from the helicopter. Her face bore a look of confusion as they stared into each other's eyes, but soon it froze into a mask of stern discipline. Steve could feel the blood draining from his face.

"Oh crap…" Steve said, backing away from the elevator, letting his half-eaten food fall to the ground. "John, run! They found me!"

"…wait, what?" John asked, staring in confusion as Briggs and Jimenez exited the elevator. "Who are these guys?"

"No time, just run!" Steve shouted and bolted down the hallway, taking the first corner like a Formula 1 driver.

"Damn it, Tooms!" Briggs shouted and ran past John after Steve, feet pounding on the tiles.

John just stared at them and looked at Jimenez, who was at least half a head taller than him, but carrying a jacket and a pair of shoes made for a much smaller person.

"Do you know what's going on?" Jimenez asked.

"I've been lost from the beginning," John said. "Are you with… her?"

"I'm her partner."

"Ahh, okay," John nodded. The two of them looked dispassionately at each other for a few seconds. "…um… bye!"

John broke into a run. Jimenez sighed, and followed him.

*          *          *

The hospital basement was practically a maze of twisty little tiled corridors, all alike. But it wasn't hard for Briggs to follow Tooms's path, as his footsteps were echoing all through the hallways. All she had to do was find the loudest noise and follow it. The more she went the more the corridors they ran through were empty and dis-used, their lights flickering on and off as she passed. Suddenly, the footsteps came to a sudden stop. Briggs rounded a corner into a dead end hallway with doors on either side.

Briggs looked from one side of the hallway to the other, pushing her dark curls out of her face as she stared down the series of identical doors. Instinctively she reached for her gun, but caught herself before she could grasp it. Instead, she walked slowly down the hall, hands held up at chest level, her head slowly moving from right to left, looking at each door in turn.

"Tooms… I know you're here," she said, her voice open, but cautious. "I'm not armed. I'm not going to hurt you. All I want to do is talk."

There was no response. No sign of motion. No sound but for two sets of footsteps echoing through the hallways.

"You've got to be scared right now," she said, slowly moving from one foot to the other, feeling the coldness of the tiles on her skin. "You have every right to be. You're going through something that nothing on earth has ever been through before."

She stepped forward again, her eyes pausing on one door, on a spot of motion she imagined. Seeing nothing, she continued.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Toom… Steve," she said, catching herself at the last possible instant. "I know what you've seen in the movies, but it's not going to be like that, I promise. You don't know this, but there's more of them out there. More of those creatures. I don't know how many, but I saw what just one those things can do to ordinary cops. You're the only thing next to a missile strike that could fight one of those things, maybe even kill one. We're not going to take you to a lab or cut you up or do anything to hurt you. The fact is, we just need you too much."

There was silence in the hallway, and then a voice came from behind one of the doors.

"And what happens after we beat them?" asked Steve. "You're not going to need me then."

Briggs inwardly cursed herself.

"No, Steve… you're not-"

"Save it," said Steve. "I can't trust anyone. I'm sorry about this."

There was a bright flash of light from behind a door. It shattered into a hail of tumbling splinters as Steve shoulder-checked through it, his white-and-black armor bursting through the door like a dancer through a cake. Briggs turned around, shielding her eyes, and saw Tooms's blurred body rushing past her, up the hall and away.

On nothing but instinct she lashed out, grabbing Steve's forearm with both hands and dropping to the ground. No matter how strong somebody is, they're always unbalanced when they're running, and that means they're vulnerable. Briggs fell to the floor, pulling Steve along with her body weight. He landed hard enough to crack all the tiles around him.

"How the hell…" Steve asked, turning his head to her.

"The best training an inflated defense budget can buy," Briggs said. "You may be strong, but you've got no idea how to fight."

"I don't _want_ to fight you!" Steve said, jerking up and pulling his arm away, but Briggs held on tight, her fingers digging into the seams of his armored skin. "Let me go!" He tugged harder, and Briggs felt her muscles straining. She knew she couldn't resist for too long, so she went with his motion, grabbing his arm and twisting it. His attempt to get free turned into a submission hold, his boneless arm twisting up like a knotted rope. Briggs was startled, but not about to give up an advantage.

"No, you don't want me to get hurt," she said, holding his arm steady. "You could take my head off with one hand if you tried, and you know it. Just like I could keep twisting to see how far this goes. But we're not going to do that to each other, are we?"

"What do you want from me, lady?" Steve asked, his voice straining. "Those things are more than you can handle, so just stay out of it! As long as I fight those monsters why do you even care?"

"This is my _job_ , Tooms," said Briggs. "I don't care how strong you are, how much you're trying to help, I can't let you just take the law into your own hands."

"The law wasn't made for ten thousand year old bulletproof animal men!" Steve shouted. Briggs responded by twisting further.

"You stupid kid…" she said. "You think you're the first man who decided that the law didn't go far enough? That they had to take things into their own hands and do what the police wouldn't? You think you're the first self-important vigilante to decide that he the only one who could save the world?" She sighed, and let go of his arm, leaving Steven to fall over on his stomach. "The difference is, you might actually be right."

Steve scrambled away, turning around and staring at her with his bright, red eyes.

"After all that, you're going to let me go?" he asked, panting.

"If you're anything like that spider, I don't see how I could stop you… they'd need to build a new kind of jail just for you," she said. "But that doesn't mean it can’t be done. You walk away from me now, we'll let you take on those monsters. We'll give you all the room in the world to fight. No law enforcement agent in the country will so much as lay a hand on you. …until you're done. You walk away, and as soon as you've got the last of those bastards, your ass will be mine."

"…that's not exactly gratitude."

"I'm not finished," Briggs said. "You can do that, or you can work with me. We'll help you. Support you. Hell, we'll even pay you to fight them. You do it on our terms and we see that nobody gets caught in the crossfire. You do that and at the end, nothing happens. You go free. You can be as much of a superhero as you want. Nobody even needs to know your name. It's up to you, Tooms. You decide how we're going to play this."

Steve said nothing, he just looked at the floor, and she could get nothing out of that stone face. Finally, he looked up at her and said-

_Brrrrrrrrrrrr!_

_Brrrrrrrrrrrr!_

_Brrrrrrrrrrrr!_

"…the hell is that?" Briggs blinked.

"I think… it's my cell phone," Steve said, and patted the general area where his pockets would be. "Um… s-sorry, this might take a second."

"Agent Briggs?" Jimenez rounded the corner, a handcuffed John in front of him. "I caught the other one. I figure he can lead us to…" he stared at the armored Steve on the floor, not recognizing him. "Where did he come from?"

"Oh, so you don't know about that," said John. "Alright, this might take some explaining…"


	18. Act 1, Part 15

Agent Briggs had let Steve return to his regular form and answer his phone. After a while, letting it ring had just become really awkward for everyone. Briggs and Jimenez watched, open-mouthed as Steve's entire biological structure was torn apart and restructured in a manner of a twentieth of a second. At that speed, all they saw was a brilliant light… and flashes of tissue and organs being violently reshaped like a child playing with clay. Images to fast to be seen by anything but the darkest corners of the subconscious mind.

"Neat, huh?" grinned John, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning against the wall. "It took him a while to get the hang of that. He was practicing all morning."

"How… how does that happen?" asked Briggs.

"Where was his phone?" added Jimenez.

"You know, I've seen the X-rays and I could not tell you the answer to that," said John. "Wouldn't even have an idea."

Steve stared at the phone in his hand like it was a piece of alien technology, crafted by a race thousands of years in advance of humanity. A tinny voice, almost inaudible at this distance, was coming from the tiny speaker. He slowly brought the device up to his ear as slowly and cautiously as if it were a live crab.

"-so glad I found you!" said the voice on the phone. "I've been calling everyone I can think of, trying to find somebody else who survived!"

"…what?" Steve asked, clutching the phone with both hands. "How did you survive?"

"I don't know man, they just… let me go!" said the voice. "I ran off into the woods! Listen, we need to meet up somewhere, we may not be the only survivors."

"Hang on, hang on!" Steve said, holding a hand to his head. "What's going on? Who are you?"

"Who am I?" said the voice. "Dude, I told you already, weren't you listening? It's Frank!"

"Frank?" said Steve. "Frank _Nelson_?"

"Uh, yeah," Frank scoffed. "How many other Franks do you know?"

"It's a really common name."

"Not the point, dammit!" said Frank. "God, of all the survivors it has to be you."

"What does that mean?"

"You know what it means," Frank sighed. "Listen, I need to talk to you."

"Alright, let's talk."

"Not over the phone, I wanna know it's you. Do you know St. James Cathedral?"

"Of course I do."

"Of course you do," Frank said. "Meet me there tonight, at midnight."

"Midnight?"

"I'm not coming out in the day… not when those things are still out."

"How did you even escape?" asked Steve, raising an eyebrow. "I saw that thing take you."

"I already went over that! God, listen to people when they talk."

"But why would they just let you go?" Steve asked. "Did you hit them somewhere? Do they have an Achilles heel or a pressure point or something?"

"I was a hundred feet in the air about to be eaten by a monster, my memories are a little fuzzy!"

"But-"

"Enough," Frank interrupted. "Just meet me at the Church tonight and I'll tell you everything I know."

"Wait, Frank-"

The voice at the other end clicked into silence. Steve turned about to see Briggs and the others staring right at him.

"Let me guess," said Briggs, her brow furrowed. "Things just got complicated?"

Steve smiled and nodded.

"It might be good news for a change."

*          *          *

In the hospital's cafeteria, Steve told Briggs, Jimenez and John what had happened at the dig site in as much detail as he could bring himself to relate. He drank from a paper cup of black, strong, repulsively disgusting coffee as he told them about the monsters that had sprung up from the ground and fell upon the dig site like a pack of wolves preying on a flock of sheep. He left out most of the details, as he could see John and Jimenez going pale, but told them specifically about Frank Nelson, how a black shape had carried him off into the night sky, but that he never actually saw him die. Briggs just stared at him, her hand on her chin, her reaction to Steve's story belied only by her steadily winding eyes.

At the end of it, Briggs and Jimenez agreed that it would be best to meet with Frank, and that the best thing they could do in the meantime was find out more about their opposition. To that end, the two agents went back to the local Bureau office to pour over the evidence left over at the scene of the massacre, while John and Steve had been given copies of the dig's logs and notes and sent back to the Evergreen State University Archaeology department.

"So why can't we just ask your talking beetle ghost about these guys?" said John, as the two rounded the corner from Ancient History into Archaeology.

"I've tried that, man," said Steve. "He says that he can't give me information, only experience, and I say 'great, give me all the experience,' and he just says that isn't what he means! Talking with this guy is like trying to play charades with the Bhagavad Gita."

"Alright, so better get this to an actual human," John said, patting the thick sheaf of papers he held under his arm. "I hope they can understand it. This writing doesn't look like any language I've ever seen."

"These are the experts," said Steve. "Let's just start knocking on some doors."

He turned to the first door he could find, the head of archaeology. Dr. Albert Beall, Ph.D. His hand froze an inch away from the wood.

"Oh… oh crap, Steve…" said John, realization splashing him in the face. "Maybe… you wanna go wait in the car or something?"

"I can deal with this John… got more important things to worry about," said Steve, shaking his head. "Let's just move on to the next and-"

"I think somebody's in here," said John. He leaned in, putting his head up to the door. "I can hear somebody, but I can't make out what they're saying."

"Let it go, man," said Steve, looking away. "Let's not disturb his office."

"Somebody's already in there disturbing it," said John, and squeezed the doorknob, turning gently. "It's not locked."

"Don't do it, John!"

"I'm doing it," said John. He pushed the door open, as silently as he could, and the voice from inside grew more audible.

"Non, je suis à la recherche dans ses papiers et il n'y a rien là," said the person inside. It was a young woman, wearing a white shirt and a dark skirt, with blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was pacing back and forth, talking on a cell phone, her gaze shifting between the office window and the overstuffed bookshelves that lined every wall of the office. "Absolument rien sur le site de fouilles ou où il allait. Il doit les avoir pris toutes avec lui. Les agents doivent les avoir maintenant, nous ne arriverons jamais à la main sur eux. Tenez, Tetsuo, quelqu'un vient dans... hello?"

The strange woman turned around, snapping her cell phone closed. Her hair was pulled back tight, save for a short fringe that hung over one green eye. A pair of sleek, rimless glasses were perched on her thin, straight nose, and her lips were curled into an "o" of surprise. Her dress shirt was open just enough for John and Steve to see a black choker around her neck with a round, red gem set just at the base of her neck.

"Are you here to see the professor?" she said, as John pushed open the door. Her accent was thick enough to build a house out of, but otherwise she spoke English perfectly. "I'm afraid that _Docteur_ Beall is-"

"-no longer with us, I heard," said John, running a hand through his dark hair and flashing a brilliant grin. In an instant his demeanor had gone from spying to smooth-talking as easily as stepping from one foot to the next. "But I think you, _mademoiselle_ , may have been the one I've been looking for this whole time."

The woman's lips curled up wryly, and her eyes twinkled with mirth.

"It's _madame_ , thank you," she said, crossing her arms about her chest. " _Docteur_ Jean-Michel de Bouchard, visiting professor of Archaeology from _Université Charles-de-Gaulle_. And before you say anything, yes, that is a boy's name."

"…if you say so," said John. "I'm John, and this is Steve."

"Visiting professor?" Steve asked, sidling into the office past John. "Dr. Beall didn't say anything about a visiting professor."

Jean-Michel's eyes went wide as she saw Steve, and practically vaulted over the desk to look at him.

"You!" she said. "You are… you are the last survivor, no? What happened? How did they die?"

"I… don't know," said Steve, inching away, his eyes not meeting hers. "It's… it's kind of a blur to me."

"We're trying to find out what happened," said John, interposing himself between the two, holding up the sheaf of papers and smiling. "These are copies of all Dr. Beall's field notes, plus the rubbings he took of the cave. We can't decipher them on our own-"

"So you want an expert opinion, yes!" said Jean-Michel, snatching them out of John's hand and turning back to Dr. Beall's desk. "I apologize, Stefan. I was to accompany the team on the expedition, but my flight was unexpectedly delayed until just recently. But for the grace of god, no?"

"Believe me, I understand," said Steve, rubbing his forearm. "Both of us were very lucky."

"Some more than others," said Jean-Michel, sitting down and starting to flip through Dr. Beall's notes. "This language is… most unique, and most _Amérindian_ cultures had no written languages to compare it to. I'll have to start back from first principles…"

John blinked twice.

"Sooo…?"

"It means it's going to take a while," said Steve, tugging on John's arm. "Come on, we'd better get back."

"I will contact you as soon as progress is made," said Jean-Michel, scribbling furiously in a notebook. "Until then, please, do not disturb!"

"Let me know if you need any assistance!" John said, as Steve pulled him out of the office. "I'm trilingual, you know!"

"Thank you very much for your help, Dr. Bouchard," said Steve, shutting the door.

"Dude, why are you in such a hurry?" said John, from behind the closed door.

"I just don't like the feeling I get…" Steve added, his voice quickly retreating down the hall. As she heard them walk away, Jean-Michel slowly closed her notebook, pulled off and glasses and scanned the lines of unfamiliar characters she was reading a paperpack novel. Casually, she pulled out her phone and entered a long series of digits.

"Tetsuo? Je ai les documents ici," she paused, listening to the voice on the other end. "Non, non, ils ont juste marchaient à droite et les ont remis à moi. Et ce ne est pas tout. Je suis certain que l'un d'eux est le Rider.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the horrible Google translated French.

**Author's Note:**

> It's always somewhat disappointed me that Kamen Rider never got a proper translation to the west like Super Sentai did, whether that's because it received a hacktacular chainsaw edit like Saban's Masked Rider or because an excellent translation was unfairly maligned by its network, like Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight. What I'm trying to do is make my own version, show what could have happened if it had been given a fair shake.
> 
> So, in 2000, the Kamen Rider series was revived as Kamen Rider: Kuuga, airing alongside Timeranger. Saban acquired the series and aired it in 2001, the same year as Power Rangers Time Force. Unlike Power Rangers, this show was reformatted as an hour-long primetime series, designed to attract an older, more Joss Whedon-y demographic. I'm not going to do *exactly* that, I'm not going to write out every individual episode, that would take something like a thousand pages and 90% of that would be filler, but I am going to try to get the plot in, as well as as many of the monsters of the week as I can.
> 
> I intend to keep this rolling as long as I can, I've got plans for the next series in this verse, and sketched out some ideas for every Rider show up to the present.
> 
> (Because it'll be important later: In this universe, Saban did not sell Power Rangers to Disney. There was also no "special edition" of the original MMPR, nor was there a hiatus between RPM and Samurai, nor were Samurai and Megaforce spread out over two years, nor were any seasons skipped over. Wild Force to RPM were broadly the same, just done more competently. You can fill in your own definition of that.)


End file.
